Le diable des deux guerres

Grace a Dieu, sacre bleu, as the evil black old napoleonics would say - there in my telescope is an Italian warship, the SS Garibaldi, and it seems to be following very slavishly and stupidly a canny cunning cantonese vessel with French colours, the infamous SS Chest of Rum with a petty officer called Lieutenant le jeun Aquitaine, which served for a long time in the russian navy, some years after it was built at Canterbury dockyards at Chatham, from which it was secretly launched for the local Royal Navy of Cantuar until it was joined at Arundel and Brighton by other vessels that powered it over to Italy with a new crew to serve there with the papal states navy up to 1815. A cunning, canny, and creepy captain who was long decorated at Canterbury for his apparent somewhat too elaborate exploits with the Royal Navy and then the French Navy and then the papal navy while actually working all the time for the Garibaldi irregulars - a case of HAS or haslet as we now say in the Wellingontonia armies. Wellington knows this guy and has seen him in action in odd colours off the coast of Portugal during the long Iberian Wars. The SS Chest of Rum and its French captain Capt Mordred.