You can now pre-order Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from The History Press.
I’m currently cobbling together a schedule of signings/presentations I will be giving in upcoming months. I’ll post the dates soon.
The History Press has released the cover art for Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer.
The illustrations composing the cover were all made by William D. Lee, an institution in Fairfield’s history and Connecticut’s art history.
A WW2 veteran who graduated Yale on the GI Bill with a degree in fine arts, he was responsible (along with many other things) for renovating the Sun Tavern on the town green and organizing the 1989 commemoration of the British attack on Fairfield, which involved hundreds of re-enactors and even a mock naval engagement off the beach.
Late in writing the book, I contacted Bill to ask permission to use several images inside, including a photo of a scale model of the Defence he had built. Serendipitously, Bill had been at work completing a painting of the Defence when I called. Not only did he offer use of the painting, but he went ahead and painted a portrait of Smedley specially for the book. The portrait is based on the single surviving image of Smedley known to us, a tiny cameo he had painted allegedly while in Amsterdam.
Bill amazes me with his boundless talent and creativity — he can seemingly call new things into existence simply by laying his fingertips on wood and canvas and metal. His house is like a combined art gallery and toy store. He once made sailboats for a living; has created architectural facades and murals for buildings throughout southern Connecticut; fashions model ships and trains and even built a remote-controlled model of a Sikorsky S-39. I cannot overemphasize his generosity and I feel very fortunate that he participated in the project.
Also, the book’s website is live. I’ve kept the design simple, but it includes a description and a brief excerpt. It will be available for pre-order at Amazon and bn.com in a few weeks and should be in stores by late June.
Angus Phillips on Richard Henry Dana’s classic Two Years Before the Mast:
Not that it’s a quick or easy read. Dana, son of a poet, made the choice that all who write about the seagoing life must make—whether to do so in the rich, exotic language of the ship and risk losing landlubbers along the way, or to dumb it down so everyone could breeze through. He took the hard way, keeping it real, as we say today.
The challenge of writing Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer was weaving a narrative that was equal parts local history, American Revolution history, and maritime history, bound by a tight 30,000-word limit. And, early on, I had to confront the same issue Phillips raises: whether to spend valuable verbiage explaining nautical jargon to readers or to proceed regardless and hope they speak salt as a second language.
I adopted what I call a History 201 approach, specifying recurrent themes or details but assuming readers knew the general course of events or customs (or at least could look them up). I rarely defined the differences between types of vessels, for example. If the reader really burns to know what a schooner or snow is, there are better explanations available elsewhere than I had space to give. In contrast I defined brigs and ships because Smedley’s Defence was both.
Another decision: I jettisoned the traditional measure of a ship’s size by tonnage, which involves a complicated formula interesting only to Age-of-Sail historians and model-ship builders, for a comparative yardstick by number of cannons. Saying a ship was 200 tons means nothing to a reader, but he will understand that a 16-gun brig was more powerful than an 8-gun schooner and dwarfed by a 64-gun frigate.
Otherwise, the West Country accent isn’t too thick. Any reader who knows her bow from her stern should enjoy it.
I delivered the manuscript April 1 and the copyeditrix and I are doing polishes now. Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer goes to press in early May and should be available by late June.
In 1780, some privateer friends and relations of Samuel Smedley found themselves jailed within the notorious British prison ship Jersey at what is now the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was enough to get their Irish up. From the journal of William Wheeler:
The winter of 1780 was much the severest that had occurred in 40 years, the Snow filled the roads from side to side, & the air was proportionately keen. In one of the coldest nights of that dreary winter, 7 captives having got out of the Ship (one of them, Ebenezer Bartram, our neighbor, had his toes frozen) waited on the ice for about 40 more. They not coming, they took to their heels, amidst a shower of bullets which were fir’d from the surrounding guardships, & made for the land.
When they arrived at Long Island they came to a house where they were dancing & went in.
A British officer present sent off for a guard to secure them & placed himself at the door to obstruct their retreat, but their comrade, a huge Irishman, with one blow felled him to the floor.
After further adventure and evasion, the party safely returned to Connecticut.
As the saying goes: violence may not be the answer — but it sure cuts down the questions. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
The genius that is Baylen Linnekin:
The proper situs of the Assembly Clause, research reveals, is in its birthplace: colonial America’s taverns. Colonial taverns served not just as establishments for drinking alcohol but as vital centers where colonists of reputations great and small gathered to read printed tracts, speak with one another on important issues of the day, debate the news, organize boycotts, draft treatises and demands, plot the expulsion of their British overlords, and establish a new nation.
In 1779, Samuel Smedley’s ship Defence wrecked on a shoal off New London. Smedley blamed the pilot, and was so worried about his reputation that he requested, and was granted, an immediate court of inquiry to clear him of wrong-doing. The court met, of course, at a tavern.
Baylen’s paper is free and easy to download. He also has a longer, so-crazy-it’s-brilliant thesis wherein he traces “how America’s experience with food and drink, British common-law protections of food rights, and — especially — British attacks on the food rights of the colonists after 1763 directly influenced the text of the Bill of Rights.” That paper’s unpublished — so far. I’m looking at you, American book publishers.