<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> T H E B O S U N ' S C H R O N I C L E The official ezine of the Thomas Kydd Shipmates' network <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> VOL. 5, ISSUE 5, June 2005 All hands on deck! 1 DISPATCHES 2 ASK JULIAN 3 BOOKSHELF 4 FEATURE 5 SALTY SAYINGS 6 A DAY IN THE LIFE 7 CONTESTS 8 COUNTDOWN TO TRAFALGAR ==================== 1 DISPATCHES + Shipmate Ambassador Pack By popular demand, we're now offering the Shipmate Ambassador Pack to readers around the world. If you'd like to help spread the word about Julian's books, you'll find useful material inside which you can pass on to friends, bookshops, perhaps your local library... As well as a signed author photograph, there's postcards of the book covers, laminated bookmarks and information about Julian and his work. If you live outside the UK, please send three international reply coupons (to cover postage) to Julian Stockwin at PO Box 76, Ivybridge, PL21 0XH, UK. Don't forget to include your full address. If you are resident in Britain, please send three first class stamps to the address above. + Kydd at the BEA McBooks Press will be highlighting their publishing plans for QUARTERDECK to the book trade at BookExpo America, June 3-5, the largest book publishing event in the US. (QUARTERDECK is launched in the US in October, together with the paperback of MUTINY. McBooks will publish subsequent volumes annually. www.mcbooks.com ) + What's in a name: the Glorious First of June The first great battle between the British and the French fleets in the French Revolutionary War, the Glorious First of June was actually a series of engagements fought between May 28 to June 1, 1794. Unusually for those times, the battle was fought 400 miles out to sea (battles were usually fought offshore). At first it was simply known as the Battle of the First of June because there was no landmark to associate it with. The man who put together the words "glorious" and "first of June" is believed to have been the playwright Sheridan, who staged a production at the Theatre Royal shortly after the battle, which he billed as "The Glorious First of June". Although Britain technically won the battle (Howe took six prizes and sank a seventh French ship-of-the-line, without the loss of a single British ship) a huge grain convoy from America to France escaped intact. The battle was nonetheless hailed as a great victory in England and Howe returned to a hero's welcome. Glorious First of June websites: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.17892 http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/makhist/makhist5_prog11a.shtml + Down Memory Lane (albeit, slightly shamefaced...) For one Australian Shipmate, the "money for old rope" item in last month's Chronicle brought back a memory of a particular incident in Singapore in July 1940, when he was one of four deck cadets about to join the Royal Australian Navy as a midshipman a few weeks later ... Alan Norton-Smith takes up his story: "The four of us were singularly lacking in funds. Our ship the 'Marella' had to wait for convoy orders to arrive so we were allowed to go ashore. To raise some cash I devised a scheme to 'sell' the ship's spare stern line to a Chinese Ship Chandler from Change Alley. He was to come in a sampan that night and wait under the stern. Shortly after midnight, we cast off the lashings and lowered the end of the 8-inch thick rope over the side. As the chandler started to coil down the long rope into the sampan, his helper passed up a bag containing three hundred Singapore dollars. Two of us were lowering the rope and the other two were keeping a lookout. All was going smoothly until the chief officer suddenly appeared. I hurriedly reversed the action and yelled, 'Come quickly, sir, some bastard is pinching our stern line!' Taking my cue, the two lookouts came running up and we all started to pull the rope back in. The chief officer picked up a handful of hatch wedges and started to throw them down on the hapless pair in the sampan. They mouthed their fury and left, but not without dire threats, which though snarled in Cantonese, were quite easy to understand. We were thanked by the captain in the morning and given extra time off to go ashore, but even though the money we had conned was burning a hole in our pockets, we knew that it was more than our lives were worth to take the risk. I'm sure that the Chief Officer didn't believe our story, but as we hadn't lost any gear he didn't say a word to the captain." + Reading groups Many reading groups are discovering the Kydd novels. A special Reading Group Pack, which includes a free CD of Julian reading excerpts from the books, is available on request to admin@JulianStockwin.com. UK Shipmate Patricia Fray, of the Wickham Reading Group, emailed that after a very lively discussion about KYDD, her group has decided to go on a visit to Portsmouth, visit the historic ships, and have a meal in one of the local taverns that still exist from Kydd's day. + Julian to go to prison As part of the Literary Festival on the Isle of Wight in June, Julian will be giving a talk about his writing to inmates at Parkhurst Prison. There's a full round-up of author events on the website. + Feature article in Bowsprit Read George Jepson's interview with Julian about his recent research trip to Malta www.tallshipsbooks.com ===================== 2 ASK JULIAN American Shipmate Joe Zerbey wants to know: "What is a lee shore?" Julian replies: "The word 'lee' comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hleo', meaning shelter or warmth. The lee is the side sheltered from the wind. This can be applied to a ship or the land. When we refer to a lee shore this is a shore that is downwind of a ship. A lee shore is dangerous if a ship is too close and has not allowed herself enough room to turn." Joe is also keen to learn more about what sailors ate aboard ship and is intrigued by names like "spotted dog" (boiled suet pudding with raisins). We'll have a feature on some of the nicknames sailors in Kydd's day had for their food in a future issue. ==================== 3 BOOKSHELF The Naval History of Great Britain, Volume One, 1793-1796 By William James Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 0851779050 This is the first in a comprehensive six-volume set that covers the operation of the Royal Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In this volume James examines such important aspects as the naval events at Toulon in 1793 where Sidney Smith burnt half of the French Mediterranean fleet, Howe's victory at the Glorious First of June and the Royal Navy's role in colonial expeditions. The volumes can be purchased separately, or as the complete set - and provide an unsurpassed historical record of Kydd's Navy, both on the national and international scale. For a chance to win a copy of the first volume see CONTESTS. === Clippers, Packets and Men O'War Published by Bounty Books 0 7537 1140 0 Re-released this year (previously published as "The Tall Ship in Art") this book highlights the work of five very fine artists - Roy Cross, Derek Gardner, John Groves, Geoff Hunt and Mark Myers. Their canvases demonstrate the wonderful variety of subjects that is marine art - from a fleet of Russian ships being towed Gulliver-like into battle by a horde of Lilliputian kayaks ("The Neva Crosses the Sitka Sound" by Mark Myers) to the famous duel between two tea clippers ("Cutty Sark and Thermopylae" by Geoff Hunt). There are also two splendid paintings in the book of the Battle of Trafalgar: Derek Gardner's "The Bellerophon Opens Fire" and John Michael Groves's "Trafalgar". ==================== 4 FEATURE +Women at sea in the Age of Fighting Sail Sailors are a superstitious race and it was long thought that to have a woman on board would bring bad luck to the ship in the form of a terrible storm that would destroy the vessel and all in her. Female mariners in the Royal Navy weren't all that common in Kydd's day, but life at sea in the age of fighting sail was not completely a male preserve. There were, of course, women who came on board when the ship was at anchor (a mixture of prostitutes and those who claimed more established relationships) - but some wives of standing officers went to sea. They assisted with the care of the sick and wounded, and even acted as "powder monkeys" during battle. And there were a tiny handful of women who disguised themselves as men and became sailors. John Nichols, a seaman aboard "Goliath" wrote of the women aboard ships during the Battle of the Nile. "There were some of the women wounded and one woman belonging to 'Leith' died of her wounds... one woman bore a son in the heat of the action, she belonged to 'Edinburgh'." Ann Hopping was born in Exmouth in Devon on November 6, 1769, and served as Captain Saumarez's seamstress in the 74-gun "Orion". Her husband Edward was also aboard and it seems both of them had been present at the Battle of St Vincent and the Battle of the Nile. In 1847 the British government awarded a special medal to all living survivors of the major battles fought between 1793 and 1840. Ann and several other women applied - and were originally approved by the admirals reviewing the claims. However, they were later refused the medal on the basis that "There were many women in the fleet equally useful and it would leave the Army exposed to innumerable applications of the same nature." Ann Hopping remained at sea until her husband died. She remarried and lived until the ripe old age of 96 and was buried at Littleham Churchyard in Exmouth - in the same cemetery as Nelson's wife Fanny. ==================== 5 SALTY SAYINGS Copper-bottomed investment Today, if we talk about a copper-bottomed investment we mean one that is strong and secure - in other words, a pretty safe bet. The origins of this phrase are definitely salty. After some unsuccessful experiments with lead, in 1783 the Royal Navy started routinely sheathing the hulls of wooden warships with copper to prevent infestation from wood-destroying parasites like the Gribble worm and the infamous Teredo worm. The process was successful in preventing worm attack but a new problem occurred - galvanic action of the copper on the iron bolts used in the construction of the ships. This was solved by switching to copper fastenings. For HMS "Victory", over 3,900 copper plates and nearly 550,000 copper nails were used to sheath the hull. Each plate was four feet long and fourteen inches wide; there were two weights of plate, depending on where they were used in the hull. The estimated weight of the copper was close to eighteen tons. ==================== 6 A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SHIP-O'-THE-LINE The dog watches The First Dog Watch was between 4pm and 6pm. The Last Dog Watch was between 6pm and 8pm. The reason for having two dog watches of two hours' duration each was to produce an uneven number of watches in a 24-hour period. This meant that men did not have to keep the same watches each day. Supper was taken at 4 pm; this was generally ship's biscuit, with either butter or cheese - and the remainder of the daily rum ration. After supper, there would be "beat to quarters" and every man had to go to his station assigned for battle. Officers inspected gear to ensure all was in order, then "down hammocks" would be piped. The hammocks were collected from their storage positions in the netting on the upper deck where they had been left in the morning. The origins of the term dog watch have been lost over time, but we do have one explanation from Kydd's day. A certain Theodore Hook apparently jokingly said it was because these watches are shorter, or "cur-tailed". We'd be interested to hear from Shipmates if they can supply any other explanations of this term. ==================== 7 CONTESTS + For a chance to win a copy of "Naval History of Great Britain, volume 1", email the Bosun with the answer to this question: When were the original five volumes of this work first published? http://www.conwaymaritime.com + We've also got a copy of "Mariner's Miscellany" by Peter Spectre, a fascinating compendium of items about the sea, as a prize this month. If you'd like to enter this contest, email the Bosun with the answer to: What is the name of the annual publication written by Spectre? http://www.seafarerbooks.com Deadline for the contests above: June 25 + Don't forget the TENACIOUS Reviewer contest - email the Bosun with a sentence that you think best describes Julian's writing and you could have a chance to win one of six early copies of the book and the opportunity to write a short review to share with Shipmates. Deadline for entries: July 25. Please put "Shipmate Reviewer" in the subject line. Last month's winner of "Nelson's Victory" was Ian Rose. And congratulations to John Devenport, winner of our first Subscriber Draw. John wins a special thank-you pack from Julian, which includes a signed First Edition, an author photo and a mystery genuine eighteenth century sea artefact. The draw will be conducted every quarter - there is no need to specially enter, all subscribers will automatically have a chance to win! =================== 8 COUNTDOWN TO TRAFALGAR + Whitehaven Maritime Festival, June 24-26 Shipmate Jim Hewitson has promised to give us a special report on the festival in a future issue of the Chronicle. http://www.whitehaven.talktalk.net/tourism/maritimefestival.htm + Maritime World Tour Australian Shipmates may be interested in a 21 day tour of UK maritime destinations and attractions, timed to coincide with the Bicentennial Celebrations. The tour leaves Sydney October 3. Further details from kateh@worldexpeditions.com.au. =================== Coming next month: It's our 50th issue! Lots of great prizes and extra features, including a special anniversary draw. Yours aye, THE BOSUN ++ Back issues of the newsletter downloadable from the website ++