Robert Aitchison’s memoir, penned in the late 1850s, offers readers a glimpse of the bygone Age of Sail. Rampant warfare raged across Europe and the Americas in the early nineteenth century—Napoleon schemed for world domination, colonized nations rose up in revolt, and Britain and the United States met, for the final time, on the battlefield as enemies. Aitchison—a young Scottish naval officer who dodged alligators, shipwrecks, and a musket shot all before his twentieth birthday—could well have become another nameless casualty of the War of 1812. But he survived to memorialize his youthful exploits in the Mediterranean, off the coast of New England, and on the plains of Chalmette, where the Battle of New Orleans finally brought the war to a close.