HMS Crossfire

One of the problems of the northern fleets of the RN in the Norwegian Sea is that from time to time, the seductions of the simplicity of the French Revolution of 1789 bewitches grey mediocre Sixth Form minds of ships like the HMS Guardian, and so too one example of a ship that went over to the pirates was the HMS Solihull who was seduced into error by the Austrian captains speaking poor low grade German with a comediac accent if they only knew, and these were the captains of the SS Schonheit, the SS Weg, the SS Gottweig the old problem again, the SS Legion under Capt Mariana, the SS Kristoffs and the SS Linz, since those captains practised a low grade mission on the high seas, stealing in to the slutshaming kind of port near the Adriatic from time to time, so the Captainess of the SS Solihull did not think her trips away from her HMS Hubby went observed, but she was eventually caught down south on the south coast plying her new trade with a new ship the SS San Riccardo Pampuri, a much pampered ship of the French line led by the vieni vieni Duke of Anjou. She was caught eventually by the great and brave ships of the RN, the HMS Baddesley, the HMS Knoxall, and the HMS Coombe while on intercept duty in the Red Sea, herself heavily laid low by her enduring weakness for Scarlet Fever, caught red handed, finger in the till, a brave girl but a traitor to the Austrians. Traitors do occur.

Pirates ahoy

One of the long term duties of the Royal Navy is the occupation and boarding of slavery ships crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and despite the official values of the Revolution in Paris in 1789, the Napoleonic ships still do indulge in slavery and the transporting of slaves, some of them quite young, as young as 14, as they like to invoke the Codex to justify their actions and their trades, since the Codex establishes an age of consent for youngsters at 14, and so the RN intercepts ships like the SS Jamaica, the SS Barbados, and the SS Gateshead from time to time, plus even the SS Port Royale, and there forces the pirate captains to disembark their slaves on the islands there, including Epcon island near the old harbour for Israeli ships. 

HMS Warwick

Napoleonic ships of the line such as the SS Sherington and the SS Haffner like to hide down south in the waters of the Sandwich Islands and South Georgia, hunting the SS Scharnhorst and the SS Tipper, hoping thereby that they will evade a call up for duty, though increasingly Russian tallships have committed to the cause and are proposing a slow process and yet a systematic process of denazifying the shipping lanes of Napoleon's traffic on the high seas, especially in the South Atlantic and the Tierra del Fuego circlet of volcano friendly islands around the Beagle Islands, very appropriately, where much hunting of the USS Fox takes place still. The Russians do not like tyrants and Napoleon is one of those.

SS Brazilia

Despite the best of intentions, to keep the battles of the Napoleonic Wars around European waters and Mediterranean Seas, every so often the fight would spill over into the South Atlantic, and so the French frigate the SS Burkha would make a bee-line for the southern waters of Galapagos and Beagle and then pursue our own Royal Navy and Allied ships around the Falkland Islands, while the Brazilian captain of the SS Burkha used to boast that he had exchanged an ep ring for a matrimonial ring in his own day when his clubhouse was raided by Portuguese squaddies looking to press-gang in those summer days of summer heat. The other French ships of their lines, the Hudson, the Sherrington, the Fairhouse, the Coughlin, the Sharks, the O'Loughlin, the Marsden, the Egon Ronay, the Anders, the Antonio, the Farrellaid, the Stoneham, the McDaid, the Shaughnessy, their Carola-Savoranola, all these and others shifted gear then and sailed to the South Atlantic where the action was keener, the pickings richer, linking up with other Brazilian corvettes seeking to outflank and derazz the RN fleet down there about Port Stanley. Messy business showing how ambitious those Brazilian rogue pirates flying the Black Pearl quite officially were in fact if not de iure. Ambition - the real motive for the later assaults on Port Royale in the Caribbean at Jamaica on a famous island.   

SS 10/7

 Strange to tell, one of the major engagements that started off very quietly was the 1812 Battle of Alexandra, in which ships of the Napoleonic Fleet were holed up in that port near Israel with nothing much to do, but as people say in old France, their devils make work for idle hands, so there too while the Fleet was parked there, battling it out for the virtues of Alexandra and flirting with those Dervishes there to the south, it was decided that the leftwing rape and torture element of the French Venerabile Fleet should pop across the border on the 7th and kill and maim and murder all round, especially though to bumrap holy Israeli virgin women and then above all, key component, to kidnap young boys for their inhuman preternatural pleasures - Venerabiles need exos. They had for so long planned that trip with many expeditions to the forests of Andreida under the SS Petronella Wyatt Earp, and other cowboy Ep ships, designed to occupy the wifey of the boy in question and dominate and rape. So the 10/7 anniversary was but the culmination of a long campaign to humiliate a young captain and his frigate there near glorious virginal natural law Israel.

SS Piotyr

Out on the far side of the great divide, now that the French Revolution 1789 flagship the SS Napoleon has taken to the northern seas and then also steered French ships into the Black Sea and involved the Russians in this war, it seems that much of the crew on the SS Veneer is now russian, and they produce much of the ammunition for the SS Venerabile too, so that the poor USS Polaris and the sister ship the USS Lexington are sore pressed and oppressed by the battlefield antics of the Venerabile and their russian sailors. How this happened is something of a mystery though it has long been the hope of the SS Venerabiles to field a USS Potemkin or an USS Aurora or a USS Burke in the harbours to the south of once glorious Rome, fighting to stay afloat in the choppiest waters of them all, the media waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea nr Sardinia with the SS Terentius Magnus. Most other ships of the Napoleonic kind are caught windless and awash in the Straits of Messina near Sicily - strange. 

HMS Blucher

But quite what the Fates had in store for the Allied Armies was a mystery, since suddenly without knowing how, the USS Crowmac sent an emergency 1812 signal to the Prussian Allies that something had to be done about the potential defection and escape and diversion of Napoleon from the North Sea, and only the Prussian Fleet was right there nearby to do something significant for their Allies in the Germanic Sea, and thus cut off the escape routes of the rebel commander and rogue leader Napoleon. So without warning suddenly off the starboard bows of the chief flotilla, on the far side of the French Fleet, we saw the sails of the Prussian men of war - they had arrived, and all because of an accidental message the USS Crowmac fired off in one of his drunken stupours to his Irish Allies, something about the service of the Twelve Tables in Rome far away, nobody knows what the signal contained but somehow as if by magic, just as the French the enemies of liberty were getting away, the Prussian Navy arrived - an impressive sight with all their glistening guns. Napoleon was gutted - the Germans were now in the North Germanic Sea - all was lost as the real person turned up in his black uniform, Admiral Blucher. The show was over. Germans hard hitters. 

SS Adeste Fideles

 Among the ships of the line of the men of war out of the ports of the Napoleonic Venerabile squadrons, there are some ships which have been named after religious subjects, like the SS Adeste Fideles or the SS Alme Siderum for instance though their leader on the flagship the SS Vincent Wang does not like that one because it is too cosmological for their very flat earth society primitive impostaziones, and we are assuming that with the Adeste Fideles the season of Advent is nobly and worthily celebrated in the college precincts and harbours, though with the presidency of the liturgical terrorists in the precincts of the home harbour there, Advent is not celebrated well nor is Christmas properly celebrated until the last moment on the Feast of Adam and Eve, crazily the 24th while the terrorists refuse to let the boys put up their decorations inside the home harbour, again not liked by the grey admirals of the SS Vincent Wang, with all the respect for holy custom that will be a feature of that holy island they will eventually journey to in the SS End of Days. So anyway, those are two or three religious titled ships that cover their men of war footing in that Venerabile port. So too the SS Dulcis Memoria which is supposed to bring out the sweet harmony in the tunes and lays and songs of the collegium omnium but in fact is somewhat bitterly celebrated come this time of year. A bitter war this one, with lots of firing of incendiaries from the French ships of the Napoleonic side. The RN steps back from it all and keeps an eye on the pirates of the Port Royal and their leader Capt Sparrow plus also a watchful baleful glare on the slavery ships of the Atlantic Conveyors even when these are threatened by the Argentine Navy, the Armada 1588 as it is now called, led by the yellow admiral of Capt Bergerac in his Argie Bargie flagships the SS Laudate Deum and the SS Venti Cinco de Mayo, deploying many ships in the South Atlantic and the Caribbean. Tough times, tough decisions for the Royal Navy of les alliances. We must pray - Oremus ad invicem.

USS Corpus Christi

Some navies do like to insert religious names onto their ships, even onto their men of war, and this is the case with the Venerabile squadron of the Napoleonic Forces in recent years, hence the nomenclatura above. It does not take an Einstein to work out where such things lead to in the long run. This is the Einstein that despite his best efforts and a long, difficult defence or viva did fail his doctorate. The famous Einstein, not so glamorous a beginning as is often imagined. But we all have to begin somewhere. Einstein like Galileo was a college drop out and some Venerabiles know this too. Galileo began his career studying medicine and then dropped out and became a maths prof elsewhere. Anyway it is like calling a nuclear submarine the Corpus Christi after the city in Texas, can be misunderstood. So too the ships of the Napoleonic line have a tendency to tempt the fates somewhat by giving religious names to their activities, just when the astute observer can spot the underlying politics of their cause. Same difference.   

HMS Lalisa

 So indeed, fresh from their campaigning in the Eastern Waters, our friends in the Blinkie Squadron have turned up a surprise cabal over yonder there, and have sent a signal to the HMS Chanty to sail forth from Singapore where some years later the George VI went down plus also the Prince, so to help in the mopping up operations, the USS Polaris beseiged again by those French Pirates and Napoleonic Carricks over there, not far from the scenes of sconfitare in the MV MacDonald at the Forbidden Cities of Peking no less, not a million miles from the HMS Xiao-Xiao of Shanghai. All to play for, Amen to that.

HMS Jennie Kim

Gosh, how time flies in the Napoleonic Wars of the two great Navies out there on the high seas, and so the Blackpink Squadron put to sea the other day this week in an uncommon show of strength, participating at a royal regatta for the ships of the line but now busily engaged in the fighting over in South Korea, in the seas of the South China Sea where a Chinese junk ship has caught fire quite inexplicably, the SS Yellow River. No sign of the USS Polaris. The Pirates of the Caribbean have deployed over there to raid the coastlines and colonies of the West, especially Hong Kong and Macao, but the HMS Jennie Kim is on to them quite quickly. She has also been joined by the HMS Rose, the HMS Kim Jissoo, plus the flagship of the Squadron, the HMS Lalisa, very effective RN frigates, their captains fresh from their knighthoods at the London Palaces. 

HMS Miss Saigon

Anyway, one of the recurring but moderne problems with the ships of Napoleon is that they do not know how to behave properly on the High Seas, preferring to act more like pirates than proper mariners of a proper Navy, so they take over old ships and go and scuttle them on some unfeeling orthodox traditional shoreline like some older Graf Spee for example in the River Plate, cave canem, according to old schemas from the Victorians and the Georgians of George III fame,  a favourite device, as the RN has discovered recently in the Caribbean waters, when the MV Vincent Wang appeared, named innocuously enough after a Chinese Napoleonic martyr of some vintage from the Vietcong side of Vietnam, and this one was operating freely and openly up the Yellow River, now a dark colour of Browne, but that was until the HMS Miss Saigon and the HMS Chanting Chantry came along to spoil that particular ruinous party, parties all there. The girl captains of those two Corvettes soon turned their guns on the murky river gunboat, and sent the MV Vinsent Wang to the bottom with her predictable cargoes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates for the SS Polaris. Sad but true, harsh but true. 

Ahoy HMS Brinklow

Ahoy there me hearties out here on the open Seas with the ghost ship, the HMS Marie Celeste, plying these northern waters chin above water to the north just above Iceland.

Three French Frigates have been caught in open waters recently in this Napoleonic Campaign to the north and east of the choppy waters off NFLD, the MV Hudsonia, a stocky little thing full of guns, the MV Cestino, also stocked with weapons for use against innocent sailing pleasure boats, and the MV Ferrero Rocher, chock full of diplomats and ambassadors to the French Court of Napoleon III and his Empress Eugenie who was keen to have them deliver some portrait paintings back home to France from the New World of New France, portraits of victims of those old French Red Indian Huron Campaigns such as Generale Munroe the Scots general after the Battle of Fort Andrew, these were pursuing some 2 unlikely RN Corvettes in those waters by the icebergs of Newfoundland, the HMS Coventry and the HMS Brinklow, the sailors on board stuffing their faces with deli beli sandwiches at the time when sighted, when the French Frigates came across a reef just under the surface and hit some ice too, breaking into their slimline tar coated wooden keels, so they have begun to founder in such inhospitable waters, inhospitable at the best of times. The 2 Corvettes took some broadsides and some long range incendiary devices and shells but have managed to avoid obvious damage and slipped away into the channels to Greenland and Iceland and then home to British and Celtic and Faroe waters. Nice escape. Tricky waters those around Newfoundland with some self-generated problems for unwary foolish pointing captains and their wooden Rekjaviker ships and gunners and that even with experienced captains of the French lines. Experienced but adventurous explorers. Sunk this morning when the Icelandic gunboats appeared to finish.