An Account of the Campaign in the West Indies, in the Year 1794

Willyams, Cooper, 1762-1816Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2

Word count: 330K words
Chapters: 34

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.An Account of the Campaign in the West Indies, in the Year 1794 by Cooper WillyamsAuthor: Willyams, Cooper, 1762-1816,Language: English, Class: F1601: History of the Americas: West Indies, Release Date: Nov 30, 2011

Editor's review

Cooper Willems's work is a participant's account of the 1794 campaign in the West Indies and a primary source for late-eighteenth-century military history. Its core value lies in immediacy: the author writes as an eyewitness, recording the progress of the expedition, the conditions of island warfare, the coordination of army and fleet, and the difficulties of marching and supply in a tropical climate. Such texts help readers understand how British military operations in the West Indies were constrained by climate, disease, and logistics, and offer detailed reference for the study of colonial warfare. Readers should distinguish the author's stance and judgments from fact; this is not a neutral military history but a narrative shaped by its era and allegiance. As a public-domain e-book, its chapter structure is relatively clear, and it rewards slow reading alongside maps and a background chronology.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in late-eighteenth-century military history and colonial warfare
Students of West Indian history and Caribbean change
History specialists seeking primary accounts for textual analysis
Readers who enjoy old campaign memoirs and maritime military narrative

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking modern scholarly synthesis and critical analysis
Readers impatient with military detail, place names, and archaic expression
General readers expecting light storytelling or novelistic narrative

Reading tips

Begin with a chronology of the 1794 West Indies campaign before entering the text.
Keep a Caribbean map at hand and mark islands and routes as you read.
Record the author's personal judgments separately from factual narration, noting his allegiances.
Read in stages, reviewing after each the effects of manpower, supply, and disease.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book an authoritative study of the 1794 campaign?

It is a primary eyewitness account of documentary value, but it carries the author's personal stance and period limitations and is not equivalent to a modern scholarly authority. It is best used as one source alongside other studies.

Can readers without a background in military history read it?

Yes, but they should first acquire basic background, such as the Anglo-French conflict of the time, the colonial configuration of the West Indies, and how naval and land forces cooperated. Otherwise names, places, and archaic terms will easily interrupt reading.

Does the book cover disease and logistics?

Given the usual content of campaign accounts, marching, supply, and disease in a tropical environment are important to understanding the expedition's difficulties. Readers may focus on such passages, which often reveal the reality of war more than battle descriptions do.

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About the author

Willyams, Cooper, 1762-1816 Author · British · 1762–1816

Cooper Willyams (Willyams, Cooper, 1762–1816) was a British naval officer. His birth and death years are clear, but public information about him is limited, and many details of his life remain unknown. Only one of his works is held in the collection, An Account of the Campaign in the West Indies, in the Year 1794. Another brief note states that he wrote a travel account of a voyage in the Mediterranean and the Egyptian campaign of 1799, which suggests that his writings were largely based on his own experience of naval operations and overseas travel. Such works typically record the course of campaigns, routes, and local scenery from a first-hand perspective, combining historical value with a documentary quality and offering later readers a reference for understanding British naval activity in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean at the time. His output was small, and his influence is mainly confined to the fields of military history and travel narrative.