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Shamelessly pinched from the NMM today...217 years ago today Sir Sidney Smith was imprisoned in the Temple prison in Paris after being transferred from Abbaye where he had been held since being captured during a cutting out expedition at Le Havre in April 1796. Despite numerous attempts to free him, Smith was held by the French for two years ( Read more... )

Posting Duchess and the Devil screencaps over at following_sea reminded me of something else I've been meaning to post for ages. I've always been curious about Pellew's reaction to Hornblower's captivity and escape, and the utterly improbable reappearance of Archie several years after he'd presumably been given up for dead. How would he have responded to ( Read more... )

One of the things I love about old books is that they sometimes come with old book plates attached. Last week I got a new addition to the collection courtesy of nodbear who tracked down a copy of Vivian Stuart and George T. Eggleston's His Majesty's Sloop of War Diamond Rock for me, which originally came from the Seafarer's Education Society and is inset ( Read more... )

Title: Reprieve
Author: Anteros
Characters: Don Massaredo, Archie Kennedy, Horatio Hornblower
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for the following_sea The Day Before Challenge. This is a variation on part of a fic called The Tithe To Hell that I originally wrote for the Remix Challenge a couple of years ago. It's prison fic so it's not very cheerful, but at least you ( Read more... )

Following on from the Marine Sale at Bonhams, eglantine_br and I were talking again about the beautiful ship models made by French prisoners of war. Every time I see these exquisite models they make me think of all the accounts I've read by Napoleonic prisoners, how desperately they longed to get back to their ships, and the risks they took to reach them. And ( Read more... )

Reading age of sail history and fiction you get used to the almost complete absence of women. You have seek out very specific publications such as Mary Lacey's autobiography The Female Shipwright, Suzanne Stark's Female Tars or David Cordingly's Women Sailors and Sailors' Women to get an impression of the lot of women at sea during the period. ( Read more... )

The Choice

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Last week I finished reading David Cordingly's Billy Ruffian. It's an excellent book of course and I know a lot of my flist have read it long since. Did anyone else cry at the end? I found the final chapter, covering the latter years that Bellerophon served as a prison hulk and describing how she was finally sold off and broken up in 1836, ( Read more... )

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