<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> 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. 7, ISSUE 2, March 2006 Avast, Shipmates and anchors aweigh! 1 DISPATCHES 2 MARITIME BRITAIN 3 FEATURES 4 BOOKSHELF 5 SALTY SAYINGS 6 CONTESTS 7 SCRAN 'N PROG 8 CORNISH RESEARCH TRIP 9 NEW ON THE WEB ==================== 1 DISPATCHES + Namesake Julian was intrigued to discover that there is a real "Tenacious" sailing today. She is one of two vessels operated by the Jubilee Sailing Trust, a charity that promotes the integration of people of all physical abilities through the challenge and adventure of tall ship sailing. Tenacious will be at the Plymouth Navy Days Festival August 25-28. www.jst.org.uk + World Book Day We've had a fantastic response to the contest for World Book Day on March 2 - and you still have a little time to enter if you haven't already (deadline: midnight GMT March 2). Just tell the Bosun in no more than 100 words what the world of books means to you. There are six prizes of a set of all the paperbacks of the Kydd series published to date by Julian's UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton. + Riley Warren Congratulations to Shipmate Riley Warren, headmaster of the Macarthur School in Sydney, Australia who was recently made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contribution to education. Mr Warren instigated an annual Writer's Award at the school for which Julian donates a signed copy of his latest book each year. You can see Mr Warren with last year's winner on the website in . + Cutty Sark Check out the new-look website of the world's last tea clipper. See if you can find the pic of Julian! www.CuttySark.org.uk + Maritime art sale record Last month saw the highest ever total (3.3 million dollars) for a maritime art sale at Christie's. During the proceedings a new world auction record was set for a work by Montague Dawson. + TENACIOUS reviews They still keep coming! From the "Illawarra Mercury", serving New South Wales's populous south coast region: "Fast action, great characters and tremendous dialogue make this, and the five previous Kydd books, top-of-the-line naval adventures." Why not add your own review to Amazon? And we've managed to get our hands on just a few more copies of the Special Collectors' Edition. If you're interested contact the Bosun - first come, first served... GBP 16.99 plus postage, each book is signed and numbered by Julian. + Cornish fans Shipmate Nathan Flamank emailed that he has started an informal Kydd reading group among his friends. With 10 members to date, they meet around twice a month - and all seem to have a different favourite title: Richard prefers ARTEMIS, for Roger it's TENACIOUS, and Nathan is torn between ARTEMIS and QUARTERDECK ... ===================== 2 MARITIME BRITAIN Julian's top 10 UK attractions with special links to the sea. +Portsmouth Historic Dockyard Unique in its combination of historic site and famous ships (The Mary Rose, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior), Portsmouth Historic Dockyard drew around half a million visitors last year. Its origins go back to the twelfth century when King Richard 1 ordered the construction of a dockyard in Portsmouth. Five hundred years later when Charles II created the Royal Navy in 1670 he gave Portsmouth the status of Royal Dockyard. In 1800 the Royal Navy had 684 ships and the yard was the world's largest industrial complex. The Royal Dockyard title disappeared in 1984 but the naval base remains the home port of the Royal navy. Some of the red-brick buildings remain from Kydd's day, and in 2001 a "hidden garden" was opened that pre-dates the Battle of Trafalgar. Known as "The Porter's Garden", it is in the oldest part of the dockyard. The porter's job was "to be constantly attending at the Gate to open and shut the same for all Comers and Goers into, and out, his Maties Yard." He had to guard the dockyard and its contents allowing "no Person to pass out of the Dock Gates with great Coats, large trousers or any other outer dress that can conceal stores of any kind." He could also sell beer in the summertime, "such as if fit to quench the parties thirst that drinks thereof, and to enable them the better to perform their labour, and not such as will distemper them." The garden also provided medicinal herbs and vegetables for the ships. Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is open every day except Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. www.historicdockyard.co.uk For a chance to win a Family Ticket to the Dockyard, see . ==================== 3 FEATURES Double helpings this month:- + Model Accolades We know many ship modellers find inspiration in Julian's writing, even to the extent of building the ships featured in the books! You can see Robert Squarebriggs's models of "Seaflower" and "Artemis" on the website (www.JulianStockwin.com -> Links -> Ship Modelling). Wayne Hawkins of Dayton, Ohio recently honoured Julian by presenting him with a 1:1200 scale model of "Tenacious". Wayne has built models since his early teens and began sailing at about age ten. He told the Bosun: "I used Langton's [a Cornwall-based supplier of specialist naval and land models kits www.rodlangton.com] rendering of HMS 'Agamemnon' as the hull form. She flies the White ensign and commissioning pennant and is shown under easy sail to the topsails, but with the t'gallants struck. The biggest challenge with the model was determining the paint scheme and commissioning flags. I settled on natural wood sides with black below and above and the gunports picked out in black. Prior to Trafalgar, there was, according to my sources, a great deal of latitude granted to captains as to colours, scheme and detail. Nelson sought out a uniform colour scheme to prevent 'friendly fire' accidents. He specified yellow side, black ports and yellow lower masts." === Another modeller, William J Romero, a noted ships-in-miniature author and educator, emailed Julian saying that he wished to include an endorsement of Julian's writing in his books and added: "I have all your books which place me in the right historical frame of mind for my own writings." William is half-way through the final volume in a ground-breaking five-volume set on the construction of HMS "Warrior". When finished, he plans to make a formal presentation to the Royal Navy in Portsmouth of the entire set, which will then be housed in the Victory Museum. www.shipmodels.8k.com --- By the way, if you want to see one of the finest ship model collections in the world, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has around 3200 in number! Quite a few of these are online www.nmm.ac.uk/collections + Tracing those salty ancestors Discovering more about your nautical ancestors can be a fascinating hobby and there is a wealth of information on the web about how to start and where to go. In the UK, the National Maritime Museum's Research Guide to tracing family history from maritime records is an excellent starting point. http://www.port.nmm.ac.uk/research/a3.html And if you are looking for details of someone who fought with Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, the Trafalgar Roll gives details of some 1640 officers and men. http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/Trafalgar/ More on researching Trafalgar heroes, both on the English and French side: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/trafalgarancestors/ If you've traced one of your naval ancestors, we'd love to hear from you. ==================== 4 BOOKSHELF "Model Shipwright" Given the focus on ship modelling this month, Model Shipwright was an obvious contender for the BOOKSHELF. This quarterly journal is widely regarded as the world's leading ship-modelling publication, providing articles, reviews and comment from expert model makers, along with authentic plans, diagrams and photographs. Although Julian does not build models himself, he has quite a large collection of back issues and consults them from time to time for rigging and other details. For information on how to subscribe email: modelshipwright@anovabooks.com We have a copy of the March issue to give way. See . ==================== 5 SALTY SAYINGS Cut a fine feather Today if we say someone cuts a fine feather we mean that he is a nifty dresser, of pretty smart appearance. The origins of this phrase are definitely salty. In Kydd's day, this was said of a ship which was sailing well, her bow wave looking like a white feather. ==================== 6 CONTESTS + Family Ticket We have a Family Ticket to the Portsmouth Dockyard to give away to the first correct entry out of the hat on March 25. Valued at GBP 45, this gives one entry to each of the attractions and has a lifetime of one year. For a chance to win, email the Bosun with the answer to this question: Name the famous Portsmouth-born engineer whose 200th anniversary is celebrated this year. + Model Shipwright And if you would like your name to go into the hat for a copy of the latest issue of "Model Shipwright" email the Bosun with the name of one of the books written by John Bowen. Congratulations to all last month's winners: David Sher and Robert Britton were first out of the hat for a copy of "The Fighting Top", and "Yachts on Canvas" is in the post to Anthony Pollard, who correctly identified the yacht Geoff Hunt sailed to the Mediterranean as "Kipper". ==================== 7 SCRAN 'N PROG - a taster of Georgian food and drink +Salmagundie In ARTEMIS, Kydd and Renzi enjoy a dish of salmagundi in Guildford, along with a jug of porter, the dark beer favoured at the time. Salmagundi was an eighteenth century speciality, a composed salad of cured fish, cold meat, boiled eggs, various garnishes and dressed with a vinaigrette. Spellings varied - one cookery writer of the time called the dish "salamongundy", and there were others who advocated slightly different ingredients. If you would like to make your own salmagundie, shred two heads of lettuce and place on a large platter. Around the outside arrange alternating strips of cold chicken breast and cured herring. Mix together diced chicken legs, one finely chopped lemon, four minced egg yolks, chopped herring and some chopped parsley. Pile this into a neat mound in the centre of the dish. Place one whole boiled onion on top of the mound and a few more around the brim of the dish; pour some vinaigrette over the whole platter. Garnish with blanched green beans, blanched grapes or nasturtium flowers. ==================== 8 CORNISH RESEARCH TRIP In January, the Stockwins headed off to Cornwall and two weeks' location research for book eight (as yet untitled). Here's Julian's report: "Kathy was not too keen on location research in Cornwall in the depths of winter (her thoughts were more along the lines of taking Kydd back to the Caribbean...) but for this book I want Kydd in home waters, and as it transpired we were very lucky with the weather, even enjoying a number of sunny days. As usual, Kathy had put together a large file of local experts, museum and library resources etc. We also got together a dozen or so books for general background reading while we were there. We stayed in the tiny coastal village of Polperro, in a smuggler's cottage dating back to the fifteen hundreds. Right on the harbour, with the evocative sound of seagulls waking us each morning, it was an ideal base to start putting together the elements for this book. From Polperro we also explored some of the nearby settlements such as Fowey and Looe, aiming, as always, to strip away the twenty-first century and go back in time to Kydd's day. I am a 'visile' and it is important for me to actually visit all the locations I write about. There's also some things about a place - smells, sounds, colours - that, as a writer, I feel I need to experience first-hand. I was very honoured that the Trustees of the Polperro Heritage Museum of Smuggling and Fishing opened it especially for us. Its displays of artefacts, particularly the fine local ship models was invaluable. I would highly recommend a visit to this museum. [Open from Easter to the end of October]. But it is always the people we meet on these research trips who provide these snippets of colour, little-known facts, local legends, and are also quite often themselves a direct link back to the eighteenth century. Bill Cowan, a very sprightly 80-something, and former pilchard fisherman, was a fund of information about the special relationship the Cornish have with the sea. (You can see a photo of Bill and myself on the website in my ; shamefully, I have to admit that Bill's sea-legs seemed better than mine!) Ron Butters was a modeller whose work I had admired in the museum, and I was delighted to actually meet him. He was able to furnish me with very detailed information on various Cornish craft. Then there was Tony White, now postmaster, ex harbour master and Jeremy Johns, a publisher dedicated to bringing out heritage books on the area. Now all I have to do is craft a good story..." www.polperro.org =================== 9 NEW ON THE WEB www.JulianStockwin.com There's new content on many pages of the website; why not have a browse around? We welcome any comments or suggestions. =================== Coming next month: the Battle of Copenhagen 205 years on, we begin our Captains of Trafalgar feature with Captain Harvey - and there's details of a six-part contest with some very special prizes! If you've enjoyed this month's newsletter why not email it on to a friend and encourage them to sign up! Yours aye, THE BOSUN ++ Email addresses can be changed via the website. Just click on on the home page, then enter your new details. ++ You can also download back issues from that page ++