John Drinkwater was a seventeen-year-old private with the Royal Manchester Volunteers when the French and Spanish began their four-year siege of Gibraltar in 1779. An observant and highly intelligent youth, he recorded his impressions of the conflict in a detailed and very moving journal which he later revised and fashioned into a full-length book. Published in 1785 under the title of 'A History of the Siege of Gibraltar', it went through four editions in as many years and earned its author widespread admiration and a small fortune. This edition of Drinkwater's journal contains an original introduction and numerous explanatory footnotes.