Author of the first scholarly history of the United States Navy, James Fenimoore Cooper had long hoped to commemorate the American navy by representing its fleet in action. Since no such fleet existed in 1841, he reverted to the Jacobite War of 1745 when the great British fleets were one. Ever the experimenter in fiction Cooper achieved a metaphysical dimension by assigning personal attributes to the ships in combat, and he also implicitly recalled his long friendship with Commodore William Branford Shubrick (much later, Rear Admiral Shubrick) in the story of the friendship between his two admirals - Oates and Bluewater - of the British Navy. The result is an intriguingly realistic romance. "In outline, The Two Admirals...is as romantic as The Pilot or Red Rover... The details, however, are in large part solid and real, and events are so handled that they raise philosophical questions - the more interesting because Cooper keeps personally allof and neither asks nor answers them directly - about the notion of legitimacy in government and the conventions of loyalty and obedience." - James Grossman, on James Fenimoore Cooper