Aha 1815

Aha so there it is. Captain on the bridge! Square up the mainsail! All hands on deck! We have just sighted Capt Jack Sparrow and his black evil ship the 25 gunner, the SS Black Pearl, cruising smoothly and silently through the calm waters of the southern Caribbean. Ah yes, the infamous pirate ship, the Black Pearl, and full of cut-throat pirates and blood-soaked cutlasses. And himself, evil Capt Jack with his cockney estuary accent. So it is all hands on deck because he never misses an opportunity to raid a Spanish gold ship or even from time to time attack a Royal Navy tea clipper - a bit on the savage side is evil Capt Jack. He is probably cruising these southern warmer seas looking for his favourite Golden Hind. Or some fair spanish square rigger to raid, board, and plunder to his heart's delight. He may even be looking for a lovely tea clipper out of Penzance called the HMS Queen of Hearts. Now there's a bootiful clipper if ever I saw one.  Very lean and very fast, and always on the way to New Spain with her spanish capitaine.

Navy slang - 1812

1812 overtures very welcome at the moment. Chief petty officer on the poop deck - ahoy there - look lively. A snowball knot sometimes occurs in the world of midshipman duties. A knot that comes apart in the heat of the sun. Likewise some of the finest looking ships on the high seas like the HMS Burco and the USS Buick look great, as clean and as polished a hull as would exist on a Waverley steam engine livery badge, but they can find the heat of battle a little bit too much, and such is the moment for a quiet withdrawal from the front lines of conflict and war and essaye. Some foreign French napoleonic warships do pack a big punch, like the SS Kungfeld or the SS Chur or worse the SS Rathaus - old worthies that know the seas around Europe and can lead younger ships like the HMS Whitman and the HMS Fairhead into choppy cross-currents from high command. Oh yass, the Burco and the Buick can be undone on the high seas of artillery and cannonade exchanges. And there are some Caliphate barges that do put out of Spanish Morrocco and Libya and Algeria that we should be taking a second look at, as they tend to crowd their decks with thinly disguised Sultan Mahmoud marines and have now discovered the uses of gunpowder and other explosives. Young ships and young crews from the Royal Yards at Greenwich and Chatham do beware. These are old arab-hugging tugs that do not mind getting dirty in the smoke of combat - very dirty - like the MV Simmonds or the MV Clothier.

1804

Well shiver me timbers maties, I am sailing the seven seas again on a high square rig and waiting for the wind to puff up these topsails, and what do I see in the crow's nest, but another square rigger at full speed, a tea clipper. These boyos from the Academie Francaise in Paris under Napoleon never seem to know what is not good for high wind conditions like today. It is almost as if they had not learned from their dreadful results at the Officer School at Brest. The last 3 candidates for the second from top title in the program, the SS Power, the SS Arnold, and the SS McGuckian only scraped passes - probatus, and none of the credits or distinctions of which they boasted they were going to get - probatus, not even been probatus, and not even a magna or a magna cum laude and no summa cum laude in sight, so I am afraid the captains from the Officer School at Brest are not as inspiring as they say they are. A disappointing lot these napoleonic frenchies.

Aha the Repulse

This beauty of a square rigger that is the fastest tea clipper on the high seas is called the Repulse - she is not so bad eh me hearties? Not so bad at all shiver me timbers!!

The USS Lexington

Ahoy there captains and sea lads and cabin boys. Funny thing to find an american colonies ship right there among the scheming cunning French and their corvettes the SS Venerabile and the MV Walt Whitman, but there ye have it me hearties, two bald as a coot corvettes with the old smokey USS Lexington giving them away and nothing between them and the deep blue sea bed but our own set of guns if not a brace of lifeboats. Not that such boats would save this lot, since the crew of these two ships spend so much time invoking satanic powers against the glory and pride and power of the Royal Navy. The king George III is unhappy at the moment, as he cannot see any progress in this naval war against Napoleon's useless flotillas. These navy lads of the Revolution of 1789 offer no consolation to anyone found at sea and always execute their prisoners, even the angels and ladies of the deep known to us as refugees. A shocking wicked lot of charlatans who do not believe in any common decency which is all we expect of a minuteman at sea when victorious over some poor unsuspecting lay square rigger. A wicked lot - there is no solution nowadays but just to fire on sight whenever they are glimpsed on any horizon, even off the coast of Ascension Island or the Falkland Islands where we have sent many prussian ships to the bottom like the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst and Tipper in the days of our earlier wars against the Franco-prussian alliances. Adieu as we say now when we are sinking venerabiles, though there is nothing venerabile about this modern generation. Sensitive lot on the subject of little cherubs we call children. And very sensitive on the subject of infant democracies.