I could get into a lot more detail shown on the sketch of a full-rigged ship—what the braces, lifts, jears, and halyards did and all that—but that would take an entire book in itself. Let me recommend, instead, “the” guide: John Harland’s Seamanship in the Age of Sail, U.S. Naval Institute Press, lavishly illustrated by Mark Myers, Royal Society of Marine Artists, Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists. The U.S. Naval Institute also has Bryan Lavery’s The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War, 1600-1815 and Peter Goodwin’s The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War, 1650-1850. Interesting, too, is The Fighting Ship of the Royal Navy: 1897-1984 by E. H. H. Archibald. Time-Life’s Seafarers series is out of print, I believe, but most libraries should have Fighting Sail, which covers the American Revolution and the high points of the Napoleonic Wars—the Great Age of Sail.
Speaking of the Napoleonic Wars … there’s Alan Lewrie, bound for the Bahamas after a few months’ rest ashore. I expect that he shall have a rather peaceful time of it during his three-year commission. That should put him back in England, should he outrun any more irate husbands or furious daddies, in 1789. Just in time for …
… but as they used to say at summer camp when they shooed us off to our cabins so the counselors could cavort with the girls across the lake, “That’s a story for another night’s campfire.”
Notes
1 “Good day, come into our street.” Traditional whores’ greeting.
2 “Will you come with me, great lord?”
3 “Poor [excuses for] men! Scum! Cheap scum! Oh, one pubic-hairs!”
4 market-whores
5 “Good, Cony-lord! Clever fellow! You may go now! Don’t fear!”
6 “Kill, kill the dirty French!”
7 “Thanks, sahib, thanks! Good!”
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
A Fawcett Crest Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1992 by Dewey Lambdin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
http://www.randomhouse.com
This edition published by arrangement with Donald I. Fine, Inc.
eISBN 9781429994774
First eBook Edition : May 2011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-96177
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Ballantine Books Edition: August 1996
The King's Privateer Page 41
