His Majesty's Ship
Terpsichore
Collectively Written by: Esteban Maturin, etc…
Edited by: Don Esteban Maturin y DeMenova
Editor’s Note:
It is safe to say that writing the Royal Navy of the 1790’s over the top is actually kind of hard without resorting to supernatural or modern tools. Never have a people been so creative, so inventive, so willing to never say die as the British Sailors of that time period.
As we were writing this, some license was taken, the ship itself was somewhere else and commanded by someone else. She was also armed with 7 pounders on the upper decks, which I exchanged for 12 pounders that match the lower decks. But the overall flavor of the story is what you might expect of a frigate of the Royal Navy in that time period.
You will find some of the language, racism, sexism and bawdiness of the time in this story. Nowadays, you can’t disparage an Irishman for being Irish, or French or any other, race, gender and sexual preference are to be walked carefully about. This group, I want to assure you, were from all different places and races on the earth, and as a group we were good friends, laughing and joking together, but when we were “On Deck”, as it were, we did our best to make the story authentic as we could.
There is one last thing I have in this note. It is to quote the Author’s Note from Patrick O’Brian in his first Aubrey/Maturin story, Master and Commander:
Authors Note from Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian:
When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the 18th and early 19th Centuries it is difficult to avoid understatement, it is difficult to do full justice to one’s subject. For so very often the improbable reality outruns fiction.
Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered 74 gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the 80 gun San Nicolás, taking her, and hurrying across her deck to the towering San Josef of 112 guns, so that, on the deck of a Spanish First Rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards, which as I received I gave to William Furney, one of my barge men, who put them, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm.
The pages of Beatson, James, and the Naval Chronicle, The Admiralty Papers in the public record office, the biographies in Marshall and O’Byrne are filled with actions that may be a little less spectacular, there was only one Nelson, but are certainly no less spirited. Actions that few men could invent and perhaps none could present with total conviction.