For over two centuries Sir John Hawkins has been known as a "most unclubable man." That Hawkins deserved this epithet bestowed on him by his friend Samuel Johnson cannot be denied, for his personality was aloof and abrasive, earning him the enmity of many of the most eminent and influential men of his time, and there is considerable truth underlying Johnson's fuller analysis of Hawkins's character, delivered with his usual humorous exaggeration to Hester Lynch [Thrale] Piozzi and reported by Fanney Burney: "As to Sir John, why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom: but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended." Hawkins indeed devoted a large part of his personal, professional, and literary life to quarreling with his...