C

Well shiver me timbers, the local leader of the intelligence maritime division says that the lads must watch those shore girlies on the Spanish coast as they make very good spies and agents. Keep mum, she is not so dumb - this is the new watchword from the Admiralty.

Up high

Nobody likes staffing the Crow's nest on board this good ship, but some lugg-head has to do it, and fortune favours the brave. Besides there is always an extra ration of cheese and biscuits and maybe a bottle of Jamaica rum for the early bird that spots another sail on the horizon.

Whoops y popsicle

Gar nichts, as the prussian armies of Blucher now say these days, but I see I made a gaffe there in my last pose by describing the Venerabile as a good ship of the line, an RN, when of course nobody really knows which side she is always fighting on, since she appears in so many liveries, but generally we have always found her to be in agreement with the values of Charlotte and Robespierre and the Gang of Four and the great Cheshire Cat that appears in the corner of the Refectory from time to time on board the ship in the sailor's quarters. A fascinating lot but probably French and Napoleonic. We must now consider whether with meagre resources we can effectively build some defence, some more Martello towers as per Dalkey Island, on both islands, to block these black French from entering our ports on the west and south coasts. Ireland cannot afford to have too many love affairs with French Revolutionary doctrine such as divide and rule divisionism. The French napoleonics cannot really be trusted with high office or the chief petty officer decks of say a Sovereign of the Seas.

Well it is cold out here

Well shiver me timbers lads, it can be cold out here on the high seas, especially without the old consolations of the south sea islanders and their many blandishments and floral wreaths. Or even without the nice warmed up sea rum and punch and puntames of the good ship HMS Venerabile and its many foreign hands on deck nowadays - a nicer kinder vessel there never was on the high seas of the seven oceans.

Aha me hearties

Ahoy there shipmates. The enemy dragoon musketeer we captured from the last skirmish in the Bay of Bisgay what with their skeleton crew on the MV Marple and the MV Burkhead and the MV Pinnocchio, is being keel-hauled today for the pleasure of the ship's company, given that we lost 4 good men in the fight sabre-to-sabre with Capt Bob Sable-sur-Sarthe leading ours, but we lost these 4 to over-hanging musket-fire from the cheats overhead in the ship's rigging on the Marple. We lost Brown of Harrogate, Rolls of Dorking, Clarke of Usk, and Keenan of Dumbchapelle - 4 good simple scottish lads in the mayne from lovely generous simple mothers, all aiming at military perfection and a good life at sea with the real Royal Navy, as opposed to a life of piracy with the frauds that the two French ghost-squadrons have become - the latest French ploy to have us all believe that there are genuine defectors to the Royal Navy out there on the high seas - actually these two-faced creep squadrons - always up the arses of the Admiralty on both sides - really do belong at heart to Napoleon, but young innocent freshmen get deceived at times and lower their muskets when they have them in their sights. So we are keel-hauling a guy called Monsieur Langridge Guy de Mau-mau-passant - found out eventually after exhaustive watching and on the French side, as ever another fiendish cabin boy of the old scheming two-faced double dealing and double pole-axing Napoleon - his best man apparently at his wedding to some cabinette near Pythagoras and his best splurge in the Bay of Biscay. Oh yes the southerners of the Mayne approaches are easily deceived - a pretty stultitious lot down south. Our own French petty officer, Monsieur de Guise, a good solid royaliste defector to Britain, knows these fraudsters from afar, as he met them many times on foreign shores in French livery before the wars of Napoleon actually broke out in the summer of 92 - where they gave themselves away with their large wads of French monnaie.  Mais oui, 1792 was a good year for the colonies under the jackboot of French imperialiste ambitions. Napoleon was always a bit of a fraudster and France given over to an orgy of blood under him and his petty tit-for-tat personalised Revolution, so much so that the good Louis XVIII had to take refuge with us at Hartwell House near Chequers De Boleyn.

Golly

Well shiver me timbers, the waters out here are colder than methinks and thought. Not like the warm waters around the SS Venerabile, where the MV Doylie and the MV Whitmore can be found, snuggled up real close and surrounded by so many young sailor-boys, men in the main who should be defending their country, if they had one.

Ahoy there

Ahoy there. Up high in the crow's nest today. And there they are again, the MV Marple and the MV Burkette, cruising around northern Scottish waters, wrapped in white surrender flags, though they never do. My oh my, they never give up this little couple, two very small frigates of no import, but they like to tackle some very big navies, and boy do they sink very quickly, as and when in Hong Kong.

Ahoy there - South Sea Bubbles

Ahoy there me hearties. Well this is a surprise in the old Crow's nest - to see a couple of old Roman triremes sailing this way but working for the Royal Navy officially, at least according to the union jacks and enseigns on their bows. Odd that these are not on their sterns where they are supposed to be. The SS Keithley Romanus and the SS Patricius Severus Caledonicus. In behind, covered and hidden by these two front-runners, front being the right word for such Destra Nazionales, we can also spot a Greek trireme of some glory and elaborate majesty, but again just slightly over-blown like a Pythagoras on his wedding day to some Nerone in the background at a low vive nightspot, and lo and behold, it is the Queen of the Aegean and her name is Cormacchione Pinocchione the Great, otherwise known among the lads as Cleopatra VII. A funny sight. We don't know what to do with these three, but they have ramming bows and all of their two-timing insignia is overblown and elaborate, like they are working for the King Ptolemy regiments of Napoleon in Egypt, so best to sink them anyway as their union jacks are upside down and hoisted on the bow, so probably false cards, playing the union for all they are worth - traitors to both king and country. All hell lads - fire at will ye sons of Victoria.

Well shiver me timbers

Dash it lads, there is no time like the present to take on some fresh water in the Portuguese Azores and pick up some fresh fruit too to cope with the scurvy that is a scourge on all long-haul voyages. Glad to get away from the last lot of French men of war. Each to his own, but the two ship flotilla is now sailing into the Azores. As per the picture askance.

Ahoy there seamen

Top of the morning to ye lads on the high seas. Ahoy there shipmates. We have come out of the Straits of Gibraltar today and these are perilous waters though, because we ran right smack into a gaggle of French corvettes and frigates from Old Boney's crowd, the SS Milnerbird, the USS Buffington, and the SS Haddenfields, so there we are. Little podgy ships that look like boyish boys, so very popular at the French naval colleges with the old crowd of petty French generals in Paris. NB - Those crushing colonials have joined Old Boney Napoleon and his flotillas and fleets. Bad enough the Spanish flirting with that French crowd, as they do just across the way by the Bay of Biscay, but maybe we shall have another bash at Yorktown or do some fine shelling of the Washington Capitol like the old days during the War of Secession, and the Indo-French Wars, when the yanks and colonials attempted to secede from the Dominions of the New World under the Crown over there by way of an illegal ballot and illegal referendum. Colonials bah balderdash !! And then they complain about the Imperial Russian Fleet - bah tis all poppycock me hearties. The Prussians - as usual nowhere to be seen, and tis always the case, when they are needed most. Where is Tipper and Blucher and Gneisenau and Tirpitz? Ruddy germans. We shall see if we can see off this colonial and French flotilla now this side of Cadiz.

Aha

Aha a mug-shot me hearties of the good old captain of the Respite.

Ah

Well shiver me timbers and splice the old mainbrayce, these ropes on a square rigger are devilish to the old soles of a sailor's feet, shinnying up and down all day, port out and starboard home. Anyway no action yesterday, as we were becalmed on the shores of a mysterious place called the Tyrrhenian Sea and then stuck for ages down close to Sicily by the straits of Messina, all trying to write our memoirs if you please, as there was precious little else to do, and we were all staring at the Fields of Elysium I'll have you, if we had been caught by a few French frigates down there. My oh my. Hot weather and calm seas - makes a grown man nervous. But methinks we shall come ashore to some shore batteries and these might send word of our presence off Sicily to French men of war. There is a pack of them out there to the south of Taranto what with Garibaldi's lot and they are the SS Rouge-silo, the Walt Whitman, and the Parsimonious Parson of Salzburg; a right crop of little thumpers swelled by the ranks of the Austrian-Hapsburgs now that Napoleon's paramour has married into Innsbruck.

Crow's nest

Ahoy there sailors, up on the crow's nest this morning. Very calm crystalline seas. We are almost becalmed off the coast at Messina. Very quiet. Nothing on the high seas this morning. And no square riggers. Ahoy there.

Blue Harbour

Ahoy there captains and midshipmen of the Seven Seas. The night is long on the high seas, and the great black expanse of water is a prey to every fear. Old seadogs often used to speak of seeing things at night that they never thought existed. But surprise surprise we are at last putting into a safe harbour near Devil's Island, the BC penal colony where we hope to pick up some fresh supplies of fruit - mangos maybe and apples and oranges and if we are really luck some lemons as lemons abound at this penal colony - good for withstanding scurvy. Ah yes me hearties, tis a long wait for such cool blue harbours. In the harbour I see that the canons point out to sea and there coming in to the port is an old sight, the old colonial wardog, the USS Cheeslepick Chuzzlewit with its very famous laughing captain, Capt Robyn le Williams, since she is famous for running press gangs around old ports and cities and inciting many a ship to mutiny, thence to sail away unharmed with the glorious tricoleur of the French - lots of guns and lots of crew, but maybe too many cabin boys in her team with their tell-tale spray-on blue bellbottoms - those lovely bones bleached by the suns of many devil's islands and all so cheaply. No ransom necessary when the crew is paid in the shekels od dead men's bones and making a base out of a hideaway under foreign secret colours. She is more than capable of turning a harbour in a storm into a signalling centre to bring down all the western navies from here, and she could do this by morning watch, as she has done a fair few times now at the harbour of the old seadog the SS Venerable de Foi. Yes Captaine Robyn she is a canny old dog - she never gives up on some private dream of wrecking western navies and their economic power bases. Never faced the guillotine though. Soon maybe.

Aha

Ahoy there me shipmates - there is nothing like approaching the great Barrier Reef for enjoyment, but there is a big storm now clouding over the south Australian coast - some heavy weather expected as we might say at the old Greenwich Maritime School. Heavy weather over Sidney.

Ah the blue respite

Oh for the deep blue lagoons of those southern seas me hearties - now there's a dancer's leg. Fiji and the southern islands of Micronesia and the like - there ain't no more bootiful sea-sight than these.

Well well well er

Well shiver me timbers and splice the mainbrayce, the old horizons were free all morning and then we spotted a sail far out on the starboard side, which when it drew nearer turned out to be a ghost ship of the old French navy, the old SS Cheeslecake, known to the frenchies as Madame Bovary le Gateau. And there she was trying to get past a Royal Navy line to rejoin her French forces in Canada where she has been working for some time now, stirring up opposition to the Crown and generally making mischief with lots of Mounties and Huron naked indians - a funny tale, an odd business.