Gordon Ellyson Abercrombie

The son and grandson of naval officers and a naval officer himself, Gordon Abercrombie has spent most of his life at sea and much of it sailing the eastern Mediterranean aboard both warships and his own 44-foot sailboat. A Royal Navy sea cadet early in life at Plymouth, England, he is also a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he earned a degree in Naval Science. There followed nine years of naval service much of it with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the...See more

The son and grandson of naval officers and a naval officer himself, Gordon Abercrombie has spent most of his life at sea and much of it sailing the eastern Mediterranean aboard both warships and his own 44-foot sailboat. A Royal Navy sea cadet early in life at Plymouth, England, he is also a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he earned a degree in Naval Science. There followed nine years of naval service much of it with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and Black Seas as well as one year attached to the Navy of the Republic of South Vietnam. As a naval officer he was awarded the U.S. Navy's Air Medal and two Commendation Medals as well as the Republic of Vietnam's Medal of Honor. The author acquired his sailboat in 1981, and for the next thirty-seven years she became both his home away from home as well as his platform for the study of history, all but two of those years in the Mediterranean. During those years he visited and studied most of the locales cited in his Hospitaller volumes. As an amateur archaeologist he has delighted in tracing the footsteps of England's George Ewart Bean, turning over stone slabs along the coast of Anatolia and among neighboring islands of Greece in search of an inscription shedding light on history. It was a similar curiosity concerning the massive walls at Rhodes 39-feet in width which led him to Hospitaller historians Giacomo Bosio and Bartolomeo Dal Pozzo, the latter himself an Hospitaller. An avid student of history, Gordon Abercrombie believes he has crawled through every Hospitaller structure west of Cyprus, not once but often, describing its purpose and history to family and friends. He has excerpts of historical interest from all four of his Hospitaller volumes posted on Facebook at The Hospitaller Knights of Saint John which may be of interest to those seeking further information. Gordon and wife Jennifer reside in Derby, England. See less