Productive farmland surrounded Stantonsburg with historic Contentnea Creek (a tributary of the Neuse River that flows to the port of New Bern) forming the western boundary.

[4] Shingleton graduated from Stantonsburg (NC) High School, where he was class president, in 1954 and then from East Carolina University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in social studies, in 1958.

[7] His dissertation is entitled "Rural Life in the Old South: The British Travelers' Image, 1820-1860"[8] (Photocopy Ann Arbor, MI, University Microfilms, 1971, 338 pp.

He received a Darton College Foundation Grant to commission the eight original maps for John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghost of the Confederacy, and its second printing (in both hardcover and paperback) was a National Historical Society Book Club edition.

[10] High Seas Confederate: The Life and Times of John Newland Maffitt (Studies in Maritime History), also had a second printing with a redesigned dust jacket, and won the Clarendon Award.

Maffitt's courage, quick thinking, seamanship, and navigational skills made him effective in extraordinary runs through the Union blockade into southern ports.

This comprehensive guide to the Confederate Navy covers its ships and men, its organization and facilities, its strategy and tactics, and its operations, including those on the Western rivers.

"[13] "The author has presented an extensively documented biography of a relatively unknown Confederate naval officer whose wartime career reads like that of C. S. Forester's fictional Horatio Hornblower.

"[18] In the 1992 issue of the Naval War College Review, Russell Ramsey wrote: "Contemporary students of the art of war will be surprised to see riverine tactics, joint operations, logistics, civil-military relations, undercover operations, innovative gadgetry, and battlefield intelligence all systematically treated in Royce G. Shingleton's page-snapping accounts of the 'Gray Ghost' navy.

Hindsight makes clear that the obvious benefits brought by Maffitťs actions - although not realized during his lifetime - confirm the need for and value for a strong navy to a country's survival.

[20] "This compact biography is in many senses a model work because it succinctly recounts the story of it protagonist, provides the basic chronology and facts, sets them in their larger matrix, and always allows the sources to speak for themselves.