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.

Ahoy - 25 mayo 13

In the crow's nest the sun is a terrible woe - scorches the shirt of your back me hearties. Shivver me timbers would be better. And look there is the old warboat tug the SS Aurora still pulling out and sailing the 7 seas with captain Christopher on board and his petty officers and largely african crew. A bit of a slave trade merchantman that one it has to be said, but hearken, tis the old flag of Republican France and the colours of Napoleon fluttering there from the stern and not the Royal Enseign. Behind is her sister ship, the SS Rosie-crucia and two escort corvettes from the French navy, the SS Angel and the SS Revolution, always with a full compliment of French republican marines. Quite a little flotilla this one. Still we might give them a run for their money and deploy the HMS Archangel - she has a full complement of cannonry - with her escort man of war the HMS Osterreich.

Ahoy

Well me hearties, we are on the rudder today, steering the HMS Repulse through unchartered waters in the southern seas to the south of Tasmania where the young devilish captain Eric D'Arcy is pilotting a curious rag bag of ships in his colonial flotilla. His own old tugboat cum flagship of the Hudson is the SS Paedoscare was originally commissioned in Germany on the coast at Kiel not a million miles from Bonn, where a secret meeting of old guard shipwrights put together a plan to blow a hole in the western navies of UK & Ireland, and these seadogs were fighting like the doyliedog seapitbull terrier of a tug as ever for the grey longcoats of the avid Russians and the pot-boiler French. The old Prussian general Blucher would have turned in his grave had he ever found about this little secret group of seadogs and their boys who wished to plunge the western navies into crisis not once but every week if not every year. Funny how little cunning napoleons blackmail whole nations and alliances into crisis. Funny how old German admirals should know better than to traduce their own alliance and their own country, but these grey higgs-bosons were on the up and up and wanted to make a name for themselves and their old grey Russian longcoats and liberal friends of Le Terreur of 1789. Revolutions - who actually needs them!!

Alors

Have got Captain Le Vin here in the Captain's mess and shortly we shall go for a short stroll around the poopdeck here on HMS Repulse. He is tired and needs a break, and I am encouraging him to splice the mainbrace a little when he sails out of port today at Capetown and off to calmer waters than these. In his own flotilla he has too many French spies for Napoleon - this is his problem.