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.