The British Fleet at the Battle of the Texel / Kijkduin, 11/21 August 1673 – Part 1
A major event on the blog this week and next! My old website contained a piece which attempted to list the British line of battle at the important Battle of the Texel (known to the Dutch as the Battle of Kijkduin), the final engagement during the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. This, in […]
Boaty McBoatface? Lame, Say the Shades of Countless Generations of Mariners
So Boaty McBoatface won the vote, then. Quelle surprise. Just about the one and only reason I wish I could still be alive in two hundred years time is to see how the maritime historians of that era (assuming that there are such things then; i.e. both maritime historians and eras) interpret this bizarre phenomenon of […]
Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: The McEnroe Moment
Busy, busy, busy! So a slightly modified reblog of an older post this week, this one from pretty much exactly four years ago, in April 2012. Every now and again, a historian comes across a snippet of information so bizarre that he or she reacts by silently quoting a certain illustrious tennis player – ‘you […]
To Sea or Not to Sea
I have a fairly extensive set of ‘Google Alerts’, and inevitably, these include the titles of my books. In part, this is so I can pick up quickly on any websites that provide, or purport to provide, pirated copies of my work – and may the providers of such sites. their extended families, their friends, […]
Whale of a Time
What a weekend it was! Weymouth Leviathan, the UK’s first and currently only maritime literary festival, was undoubtedly a tremendous success. A packed programme embraced a wide variety of talks and other events, many of which were attended by large, enthusiastic audiences. From a personal point of view, it was great to be able to […]
The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part 3
The third and final of my posts from November 2011, now updated and reblogged ahead of my appearance at Weymouth Leviathan, the UK’s first Maritime Literary festival, on 13 March. George Legge, first Baron Dartmouth – Legge was an important model for my fictional hero, Matthew Quinton. The son of Colonel William Legge, later Master […]
