Embedded@Trafalgar with Nelson's Navy Read online

Embedded@Trafalgar

  with Nelson's Navy

  By

  Roger Busby

  Lt Cdr (SCC) RNR

  Published by

  Embedded@Trafalgar

  Copyright 2012 by Roger Busby

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy; recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without the permission in writing for the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Dedication:

  This version of the Trafalgar story is for the UK Sea Cadet Corps, junior image of the Senior Service, who commemorate Trafalgar Day on 21st October each year on behalf of the Royal Navy.

  and

  as always for Maureen with love

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Day One

  Day Two

  Day Three

  Day Four

  Day Five

  Day Six

  Day Seven

  Day Eight

  Day Nine

  Day Ten

  Day Eleven

  Day Twelve

  Day Thirteen

  Day Fourteen

  Day Fifteen

  Day Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Biography

  Other Titles

  Connect with me

  My website

  Prologue

  Media mogul Big Billy thinks Nelson is a pussy and he’s going to do something about it . As news of Horatio’s love life leaks, paparazzi stake out Emma Hamilton Across the Channel Boney’s on French TV talking up invasion On the high seas off Southern Spain a British battle group clears for action. Seen through the eyes of a modern-day reporter embedded with the task force, this is Trafalgar - today

  Day One

  There's a certain intimacy about the word "embedded." I don't know who came up with it, but once it was in common usage, we talked about it endlessly in the pub. Embedded, being there, part of the action, eyewitness news on the front line. Embedded became a term shared by the media and the military to describe correspondents who were carried to war as an extra mural member of a fighting unit, journalist as warrior, and it was hoped, certainly from the military standpoint, that this symbiosis, a new quirk on the old Stockholm syndrome, would rub off on the reporters and ensure that coverage swayed towards the soldiers' point of view. Sure there was huffing and puffing over journalistic integrity and freedom of the press, but if you wanted to go to war there was no better way than embedded.

  You see the Vietnam War had taught the military a hard lesson. If you have newsmen running around the combat zone, left to their own devices, reporting the kill count as it happens, blood baths like Mi Li Four, then the public appetite for the conflict diminishes in direct proportion to the tv footage of body bags coming home. So if you couldn't muzzle the media, then the next best thing was to get them on board, get them embedded, in the hope that the old adage that it is better to have your critic in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, would pay dividends.

  Not that the military were less than sanguine about the prospect, Imagine how it would have been if there had been reporters embedded at The Somme filing eyeball accounts from the trenches of soldiers eating rats to stay alive, and the criminal lunacy of officers ordering troops over the top into machinegun fire.

  But those kind of considerations didn't cloud the judgement a couple of centuries ago when the spectre of invasion from across the Channel loomed large, and Napoleon Bonaparte summoned the combined naval strength of France and Spain into the largest battle fleet the world had ever seen; when the course of history hung by a thread. When the nation turned to one man, already hailed as a national hero, to save the day. So this is the story. With all the journalistic technique, the breakneck speed of instant communication technology and the clamour for on scene reporting; with every morsel of the action devoured to satisfy the voracious appetite of twenty four seven rolling news I can tell you what transpired when Nelson set sail for the great sea battle off Cape Trafalgar because I was there, embedded with the fleet.

  My name is John Pretty, naval correspondent of the Daily Chronicle, and with the benefit of hindsight I have collected all my pieces, the news columns, the features, the e-mails, the tapes and scribbled shorthand notes, into a chronological sequence, translated the arcane patois of the eighteenth century tar into the modern idiom to give you a feel of how Trafalgar played in the press. If you want the unalloyed facts, go to the history books, but if you're curious to know how it felt to report Trafalgar then as Mark Twain put it, turn the page, read the log.

  Transcripts of tape recording recovered from the Orlop deck, HMS Victory, at sea.

  voice ident: John Pretty

  Jesus I can hardly breathe. Smoke, black and dirty grey flecked with orange from the cannon flashes, just rolls down on us from out of nowhere. Now you can't distinguish it from the sickly colour of the sea, just the motion of our cutter rising and falling on the long swell is the only sense of movement. The lads are heaving on the oars, sweaty faces ashen, squinting against the stinging gun-smoke, and I can feel the fear in the air writhing out of this choking smoke like a serpent.

  Heave and away - steady lads - steady.

  That's the cox'n leaning hard on the tiller, threading us through the tangle of debris all around us now. I can make out shattered spars and rigging, all tangled up, and shredded canvas, washing about in the sea, and we're crashing through it, and it's a miracle we're still afloat. The lads are straining on the oars, willing the boat through this graveyard. Man, it's hard to believe just a few hours ago this was a clear sunny day with white sails against a blue sky and the only noise the gulls around the masts. Like we've been plunged into hell.

  Two-six heave and away - two six heave.

  I can see spurts of fire through the fog, and muffled thunder, getting closer now, percussions hitting us like dull clapper blows. I reckon we must be in the thick of it by now, not that we've been able to get our bearings much since we left the Pickle seems like an age ago.

  Steady.. steady now

  The cap'n was getting frustrated because we couldn't see what was going on, so he called for volunteers to take the sea boat over to the Victory and get a sitrep, and I jumped in for the ride, thinking the chance to file a first person piece from the flagship was too good to miss. So here I am, crouched in the bottom boards, just trying to keep a running commentary going for as, long as I can, so I don't miss any of the colour. Only this looks bad, I mean really bad.

  Ship ho

  That’s the lookout in the bow, and there's a break in the smoke now, and I can see a ship close by, looks like a black cliff from down here, and I can't make out -- Jesus, a big splinter of mast just came flying past us, and there's the thump of a carronade going off somewhere up there, shot whistling over us.

  Ahoy the ship

  That's the cox'n, yelling at the top of his voice so they don't shoot at us. Lots of boats get lost to friendly fire, blue on blue, from itchy gunners and we sure as hell don't want to join them. Just hope this is one of ours. Just got to pull for it, and hope for the best. There's bits of wood and rope swirling all around us, and we're going to (inaudible)

  …Oh boy, that was close, looked like part of the mainmast, all chewed up, hit the water right alongside with a terrific splash, and we shipped scummy green over the side. Oh this is so bad. Now the smoke is clearing, like someone just drew a great big curtain aside, an
d I can see the hull right on top off us. Hey, good old English warship oak all right, black and ochre. It's the Victory all right. What-- what? Collins, one of our midshipmen is tugging at my sleeve. I can't hear him over the din from up above, but he’s pointing to an open gun-port just overhead -- I can just make out the mouth of the cannon, so they must be firing on the far side, the starboard side and we've come up to larboard. I can't hear him, but I think he wants to jump for the gun-port. I can see a scrambling rope, the cox'n's bringing us alongside now. I'm on my feet watching the pitch of the boat. Only a couple of yards to go, and I'm grabbing my stuff and thinking shall I jump for it? Weighing the odds. Old Harry's going to be proud of me if I make it this time. What the hell -- I'm going to jump…

  (tape cuts off)

  Daily Chronicle Newsroom conference (extract)

  Harry Oakes - Features Editor

  Samuel Foreacre - News Editor

  SF: If you ask me the weapons of mass destruction malarkey is just so much horseshit whipped up by our lords and masters to keep the war going. I mean where's Napoleon going to get that kind of gear? It’s the French and Spanish for gods sake, and where in the name of sweet Jesus are they going to lay their hands on WMDs. Nah, it's all a smokescreen so we can kick ass with impunity and keep the lumpen proletariat on side come the next election. Nothing like a good old WMD scare to stiffen the sinews. Only has old Boney got any - has he hell.

  HO: Maybe we could get a colour piece from one of the boffins who was out there looking for 'em, you know the cloak and dagger crowd, see if we can flush out a whistle blower.

  SF: Could cost a packet if we try for a buy up, you know what they're like H, only one thing going to make a scientist put aside his scruples when he's sucking on the government's teat and that's a great big pay day, a sack-full of shekels, and you know what Big Billy said about buy ups. No Way. And that's come down on a tablet of stone, so you reach for the company chequebook and he'll have your balls on his watch chain.

  HO: So what d'you reckon Sam?

  SF: We're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't. You want my opinion, this whole WMD angle is a dead duck, we're never going to get to the bottom of it, not in a million years, unless something happens to change the picture, so I think we ought to just let it lie for the time being and see what turns up. I mean, when you come down to it, everybody knows the only real weapon of mass destruction out there is His Britannic Majesty's Royal Navy. Projecting sea power, that's the name of the game, and any mug that gets in the way, blow him out of the water.

  HO: Maybe we could do something on that then, Britannia rules the waves or some such. Make a change from all that gung-ho sabre rattling, mud plugging stuff we're getting over the wire from the agencies, you're lucky if you can get a par out of it, mostly spike fodder, and this war of attrition with long, drawn out blockades, has slipped off the news agenda, networks have ditched it ages ago, you watch TV you wouldn’t think we were still at war.

  SF: Not sexy enough for the telly, but you’re right, we're still got good old Horatio to pull our nuts out of the fire. We sure as hell could do with a good splash, you see the latest circulation figures, the old man blew a gasket, started bellyaching if we don't deliver the goods soon, heads will roll. Hmm Nelson could be just the ticket, last I heard he was off to sunny Spain with the bit firmly between his teeth. Nice pics when he set off from Pompey. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I like it. And not come half-baked stuff cobbled together from the PA. We need a good hard hitting incisive news feature, which will knock the socks off the red tops and put a smile on Big Billy's face. Who've we got with the fleet?

  HO: You know, John Pretty, old Ted's boy, you remember. We had to bung half the Admiralty to get him on board, he's been bobbing about on the ocean wave for the past couple of months.

  SF: Oh yeah, didn't he do those nutter-who-rowed-the-Atlantic stories?

  HO: Don't knock it; we got good feedback on that.

  SF And didn't he swing a keg of rum on his exes?

  HO: To loosen matelots' tongues. Yeah, that was our John; they don’t call him Sitting Pretty for nothing. Shall I give him a bell; see what he can work up?

  SF: Do that Harry, and tell him to make it something tasty so we can wean Big Billy off his WMD hobbyhorse. Yeah, get Pretty boy weaving and I'll shoot a memo upstairs.

 

  e-mail

  From H Oakes [email protected]

  To John Pretty [email protected]

  Cc [email protected]

  Subject Nelson feature

  John

  Top of the morning shipmate. Out of your hammock, we need a thousand words for the leader page, Nelson and all that jazz. Make it good and hot, lots of colour. Keep your head down and your powder dry and as they say on Star trek - make it so. File soonest matey and pick up the web traffic if you want to keep your job! Have a tot for me

  Harry

  Harry Oakes

  Features Editor

  Daily Chronicle

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  Daily Chronicle Features

  Navy Blues

  By John Petty

  Naval Correspondent

  Loitering off the coast of Spain under sun kissed skies and balmy breezes may seem like a holiday cruise, but here on the Royal Navy's most powerful warship, these languid days on patrol belie a much more serious intent, a deadly game of cat and mouse.

  For at any moment the lookout's cry of "sail ho" could send battle hardened sailors to their guns ready to fight to the death. Strange as it may seem in this tranquil setting of blue seas and endless sky, we are the last line of defence against a cunning and determined enemy pledged to put England to the sword.

  Not that this threat lurking just over the horizon in any way dampens the spirit of the gun crew aboard HMS Victory, First Rate Ship of the Line and flagship of the British fleet. Pressed men, landsmen and veteran sailors alike go about their routine duties, dressing sails and working the ship as if they were all on that pleasure cruise. Men like boatswains mate Lee Miller squatting on the blanched deck of the forecastle splicing a hawser, the marlinspike dancing a jig in his hands. "I don’t care what they throw at us," he told me with a cheerful grin, "long as he boss is on the quarterdeck we'll be all right."

  The boss of course is Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke of Bronte in Sicily, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Grand Cross of the Orders of Ferdinand and of Merit and Knight of the Imperial Order of the Crescent, charismatic victor of the battle of the Nile and countless sea duels of outstanding seamanship. This is his flagship, a gun platform of devastating firepower poised to deliver a hammer blow to any aggressor who dares challenge England’s supremacy at sea. This is the might of the Royal Navy personified in one man. And the crews of his fleet, from the career captains to the men so often snatched from the taverns of old England, the Kings shilling pressed into their palms, would follow him into the jaws of hell, so powerful is the myth and legend of this extraordinary seaman, this man of our time whose time has now come.

  Dwarfed by the vastness of the C-in-C's stateroom, The Great Cabin with its sweeping seascape panorama, the diminutive figure of Nelson wearing his battle honours, eye-shade and armless sleeve, pores over a bundle of charts.

  "There was a time when I could have had him," he exclaims, the good eye sparking with intensity as he stabs a forefinger into the parchment. "Only dammit, the old fox secured the weather gage and gave me the slip." He is referring to his archrival the French Admiral Pierre Charles Villeneuve who ducked and weaved and eventually succeeded in outmanoeuvring the Toulon blockade in March to escape through the Straits and strike out f
or the West Indies.

  Nelson turns and leans on the chart-strewn table. "Ah well, the word is his days are numbered, old Boney has lost confidence in his ancient mariner and plans to replace him with that popinjay Rosily, well time will tell, we've chased each other's tails half way around the world so I'll miss him when he finally swallows the anchor."

  A slight frown darkens his brow. "We only have ourselves to blame for the last fiasco. If I'd had the ships I could've bottled him in so tight not even a ship's rat could have got through. But as you know, after the Treaty of Amiens, our masters in their infinite wisdom, decimated the Navy, paid off the ships and imagined we were basking in newfound peace." He gives a bark of rueful laughter, "But the plotters across the channel hadn't given up their desire to seize the jewel."

  He is right of course, Napoleon still dreams of dominating Europe and that means crushing the British. He knows only too well that if he launches an assault, the Royal navy will simply blockade his ports, as they have so successfully in the past, and put the squeeze on French trade routes until the pips squeak. But now I can reveal that his master plan involves a fleet of invasion barges to carry his army across the Channel, and for that expedition to succeed he needs to dominate the sea. That's why he's ordered his fleets in Toulon, Brest and Ferrol to break out of the blockaded ports.

  "When I got wind that the French fleet had sneaked out, I fear I backed the wrong horse," confided the Admiral, "I assumed he's head for Egypt so I set a fleet course south east. When I realised my mistake the old fox was making for the Indies with a spread of canvas and a fair wind. I was left trailing in his wake."

  As Nelson made up for lost time, Villeneuve rendezvoused with his opposite number, Admiral Gravina and the Spanish fleet from Cadiz and they sailed in convoy for Martinique to water and provision. So went the early months of the summer, a chase across the Atlantic and back to Europe, the creak of wood and the slap of canvas as the ships strained to hold station and the fleets dogged each other, seeking to make the most of fickle winds and mixed weather.

  The game of cat and mouse has gone on for weeks, Villeneuve lost some of the initiative while he waited for Ganteaume to join him, but his attempt to beat the blockade was foiled and as he limped back to lick his wounds, so Villeneuve headed back for Ferrol, fighting off Calders' squadron of fifteen British battleships which intercepted him at Cape Finistere.

  "Calder should have known better," Nelson reflects on the engagement, "Ok, so the weather was bad and visibility was poor, but he had the edge and if he'd pressed home his attack the Frenchies would have been badly mauled to say the least. Now all he's got to look forward to is a court martial and I've lost the ninety-eight guns of the Prince of Wales." A sigh of exasperation escapes his lips at the recollection that he had been obliged to release one of his finest ships to take his disgraced commander home to face the music at the Admiralty.

  But there was a bonus. The action unnerved Villeneuve who abandoned his plan to reach Ferrol, changed course for Cadiz, but then foul weather forced him to put into Vigo to re-supply and just to add insult to injury, Napoleon, increasingly frustrated at his Admiral's inability to get his act together ordered him to sail for the Straits of Dover where his invasion force was gathering.

  "We got wind of that too," said Nelson, "and we would have taken him on there and then, but he didn't have the appetite for a fight with half his ships run ragged, and personally I don’t blame him - I guess that's why he connived with that snake Decres, the Frenchies Chief Minister of Marine and Lord High Fixer and bolted for Cadiz - and that's where we stand today."

  He fixes me with that brilliant eye, and I can see why his men worship him; this is tungsten steel. Nelson turns on his heel and sweeps his arm across the view from the stern gallery. "The combined enemy fleet tucked away in there and my picket ships watching for signs of activity while we make ready for the battle which must surely come." Swings around to face me, features set in implacable determination, "And mark my words Mr Pretty, he won't escape me this time."

  Memo to Features Ed: Cobbled together in a hurry, H. Hope this will do as a holding piece to keep BB sweet. I’ll pick up the Trafthread on the Web and update the blog - I get the feeling its going to hit the fan soon. JP

  Day Two

  Extract from tape recording recovered from the Orlop deck, HMS Victory at sea. (Recording is poor quality and in places inaudible)

  So I jump up, grab the rope and haul myself up, swinging in through the open gun-port and the first thing that hits me is this terrible acrid smell of gunpowder, hits me in the throat, and straight away I'm coughing like I'm choking, like I'm being throttled by it and my eyes are streaming now. And I reach out to steady myself, and I grab onto the cannon, you know, the barrel, thinking jeez what an idiot, if that had been fired you'd have burned your hand off. Only it’s cold, ice-cold iron, thank God, only there's something else warm and wet and sticky. And I look at my hand up close to my face and it’s covered in blood. I'm, stunned, thinking I must be bleeding and I knuckle my eyes to see what it is and look around, and its not easy because it’s really dark in here and I'm disorientated anyway, and my eyes are still watering and stinging like fury from the smoke, and the deck-head is so low down here you have to crouch anyway, but I just know something isn't right here.

  I'm gagging and trying to catch my breath. and I'm looking down, and I can see sand on the deck, the deck's covered in sand and the sand's all soggy too -- oh god soaking up blood! I keep thinking I must be bleeding.

  So I knuckle my eyes again and wipe 'em with my shirt sleeve, starting to panic, and I look around again, and just can't believe what I'm seeing, it just doesn't register and I can't take it in. It’s a slaughterhouse in here! Not just blood, but body parts, arms legs, heads, chunks of flesh, like a mad butcher’s shop. And there's chickens pecking around in this mess and rats running like crazy and I tell you, I'm just numb, can't take it in.

  I can feel a tug on my sleeve, and it takes me a minute to realise it's Collins, the mid who jumped with me, and all of a sudden I’m thinking this is a kid of thirteen, for Christ’s sake, he shouldn't be in a hell hole like this. That’s how my thoughts are, jumping all over the place. And he's pulling my sleeve, and telling me, quite calmly, 'we should get out of here' and I don't believe this is happening. I mean the only way I can describe it is, its like coming up through the water from a deep dive, and struggling to reach the surface before you drown. Feels like my lungs are going to burst, but I daren't let the breath out and a band is tightening around my chest. And then everything slows down into weird slo-mo, like I'm out of my body and looking down at myself as part of the scene, and now I realise what's happened here, clear as day. This deck's taken a direct hit, but the ball hasn't passed through, it's shattered a bulkhead, sending out a blizzard of splinters like flying knives. The gun crew, poor devils, never stood a chance, they were cut to pieces. The kid's pulling at my arm, but I cant tear myself away. The horror of it all has this kind of awful fascination, which I can't shake off…

  You know what? It’s the chickens that bother me most, they must have got out of their coops and now they're running around in the blood soaked sand like demented things, going crazy and pecking each other. They told me they put sand down, when they go to battle stations, so the decks don’t get slippery, but I never imagined it'd be like this, not in a million years. And I'm thinking to myself, this is something I could never describe in words - I'd never want to. Nobody should have to see something like this, its going to stay in my head, like a bad movie, going to be my recurring nightmare.

  Extract from audio diary, personal effects of John Pretty, wardroom HMS Pickle

  Voice ident: John Pretty, Naval Correspondent Daily Chronicle

  When a war reporter tells you he wasn't scared, he's lying. I don’t care if you're freezing your nuts off in a foxhole in Bastogne, taking incoming at Khe Sanh, eating sand in Desert Storm or tip toei
ng through and IED strewn compound in Afghan, you're scared; I mean really scared. Sure, you have access to the technology, you can file off a sat phone from a waddi in Iraq, or a bombed out shell in Bosnia, but the more times you go out there, the more times you eat up the fire-fights or duck the RPGs, little by little you go insane. So maybe I'm wrong. Scared isn't the word for what I'm feeling. Scared is a civilian word meant to describe the emotion of ordinary people in an ordinary world. When you go to war, when you go to war as a combat correspondent, it's like going to another planet, and I don't care what anybody says about all that bearing witness stuff, something of the soldier rubs off. The everyday emotions are dulled, the instincts for survival turned up to the nth degree. No, scared in it's normal context is not the right word. Whoever coined the phrase "shock and awe" got it about right, not the intended context to be sure, but it accurately describes what goes on inside your head when you hit the TO, jump from a chopper into a rice paddy, press your face into the mud and will the earth to swallow you up. What you feel is shock and awe, so next time you’re having a drink with a war reporter, and you raise your glass and ask if he was scared, look into his eyes and I'll guarantee you'll get the thousand yard stare. And you know he's been somewhere else, some place where morality holds no sway, where he just clung on and slowly went a little mad, somewhere you can't even start to imagine. And of all the war zones, fighting in ships is the worst. Men crammed together in wooden hulls, blasting away at each other at point blank range with weapons which fire a hail of ball-bearings, gunpowder magazines which explode at the slightest stray spark, cutlasses, pikes and boarding axes which lop off heads and limbs and reduce men to a smear of offal. Decks which run red with blood, the screams and the pleadings of the dead and dying, and nowhere to run to. The kind of close quarter combat which gives brutal a new meaning. But that's how it is, and that's how it will always be.

  You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little morbid today, just getting my thoughts on tape while I can because I have a feeling I'm going to be making that transition soon, shutting down my sensitivities, and when I do I know there will be no going back and all this stuff in my head will be lost and I'll be like the rest of them, standing at the bar in some tavern telling war stories, and someone will buy me a drink on the strength and ask the question they always ask : weren't you scared? And I'll say --scared, hell no, I was just doing my job. And I'll be part of the lie.

  Which got me thinking. How did I get here? How did I earn the distinction of becoming the first war reporter assigned to the Royal Navy? Well I didn't get whacked over the head in some alley and dragged aboard a Ship-of-the-Line like some of the poor devils in the forecastle who were grabbed by the press gang to meet the recruiting quota. No, with me it was all very civilised. Someone upstairs at the paper had a hook with the Admiralty, we've always been big on naval stories, and given the Service a good show, so after some wrangling, and no doubt an exchange of a sweetener or two to assuage their Lordships' misgivings about loose cannons on the gun-deck, I was duly presented with a document of free passage as an acting unpaid honorary lieutenant to satisfy the niceties of naval etiquette.

  Those early days on board were an eye opener, the cramped quarters, slinging a hammock and sleeping with my face an inch from the deck-head, the stink of the "heads" the latrines in the bow where the crew, officers and men alike relieved themselves, ah the joys of shipboard like. I filed a few pieces to keep my hand in, and of course my shipmates were fascinated with the technology, so I offered to let them call home on the satellite phone, wives and girl friends, families ashore, only of course they didn't have any way of receiving calls, and then I heard mutterings on the mess-deck about witchcraft and how I might be a devil, or worse still a Jonah, which I soon discovered was the worst thing you could possibly become aboard ship, the sailors being such a superstitious lot. If the rumour really took hold, the likelihood of what is euphemistically known as a "Jonah's lift", pitched over the side with a cannonball jammed in your pocket so you don't come back up, became a very real possibility. So I kept it simple, played along with the quaint customs, and tried hard to fit in, and soon enough the suspicious looks faded away and they took me at face value.

  What you have to understand is the hands converse in what sounds like gibberish to a lay man’s ear, reef and snug the royals if you please Mr Gittings, and the work of the ship is predominantly manual labour, constantly adjusting the set of the sails through a complexity of ropes called stays and halyards as we bowl along at a good rate of knots throwing up a clean bow wave under the bowsprit and a frothy wake astern marking our progress.

  Right now I'm embedded aboard HMS Pickle, the only schooner out here, and we've been making best speed to join the fleet of frigates and battleships - they call First Rates, ships of The Line, off Cape Trafalgar before the fun starts. But as I was saying, how did I get here. Back in the pub people kept asking me how come of all the talent in the Chron newsroom I got picked for stardom. Well I thought about that a lot, I mean I'd done my fair share of legwork, hard news, features, but nothing that jumped off the page, and as far as I knew, Big Billy, proprietor and editor in chief didn't know me from Adam. I hadn't sailed around the horn single handed either, so it was puzzling to me too. How did a landlubber like me who doesn't know one end of a ship from another, or the difference between a bowline on the bight and a running sheep shank, get promoted from general news hack to naval correspondent with a salary hike and unlimited exes? I used to lie awake at nights giving that one some serious thought.

  Then it struck me like a bolt of lightning. I'd got that intrepid adventurer Sid Rawlings to thank for my stroke of good fortune. Old Sid, the plumber from Sidcup, who drove his missus mad building a boat in their back bedroom so that he could row the Atlantic. Only by the time he'd finished, the boat had grown like Topsy, and they had to demolish half the house to get it out. Well I covered the divorce and did some human interest stories on Sid's exploits, he was always good for a page lead on a slow news day, but when he hauled his creation up to Cape Wrath behind his beat up VW camper, nobody really believed he'd actually do it. I went up there, against my better judgement, and sat around the hotel for a couple of weeks twiddling my thumbs while Sid got beaten back every time by the currents. Then, one fine day, I got up in the morning and what d'you know, he was gone.

  The news desk went ballistic. I mean Sid had been our story all along and now the pack was getting in on the act, and all of a sudden he was big news. The desk was squealing for daily progress reports, so what could I do? Sid had vanished into the wide blue yonder, and that's a lot of sea out there. I remember standing on the headland where he'd parked his camper, just looking out to sea, cursing his stubborn hide, and thinking to myself poor old Sid, got to be fish bait by now. But that wasn't the story the paper wanted. Like I said, Sid was our guy, we'd sort of adopted him, expended precious column inches on him, so now it was payback time in spades, with a beat on the opposition every edition. I mean what could I do, stuck up there in bonnie Scotland. Hire a boat or a plane? Go scouting the ocean for a rowing boat? The old needle in a haystack routine. Well I thought about that for a couple of minutes, then I went down to the library, got out an old school atlas and began Sid's saga with colour pieces each day plotting his progress across the blue feature; his encounters with ships, tankers and merchantmen toasting his courage as he battled by, his heroic tussle with mountainous seas, beating off sharks with his bare hands, all stirring stuff. The paper lapped it up, had graphics producing a progress chart as if we were right there with him in the boat, but after a couple of months of this, when I was safely back in London, the shine wore off, and Sid was relegated to a few filler pars, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The story was going to die a natural death, just as I imagined poor old Sid had met his maker.

  Then out of the blue, bingo! He turned up. Hauled his boat up a Florida beach to a hero's welcome. The desk went ape and
ordered our New York stringer to hot foot it down there and get an exclusive interview with the intrepid mariner. Jesus, that's torn it, I remember thinking. The jig's up now. And I was standing behind the copytaker when reams of stuff started coming in over the wire. I couldn't believe my eyes - there were all the same adventures I'd described in my flights of fancy, only this time jazzed up even more; not one shark but a whole shoal of sharks, and the Albatross Foot the mythical current which had carried him a thousand miles in one day, there it was, all flooding back in first person quotes. Soon as I could, I got the New York guy on the phone. He was a bit cagey at first, but after I'd convinced him I was on the level, he told me, strictly entrez nous, that there was no way he was going to leg it to Florida on the kind of rate the Chron paid when he could pull the cuttings and wrap the whole thing up from his Greenwich Village pad for the same per-diem. I remember walking down the street laughing like a drain; it was so ironic.

  That was it, no one the wiser, except maybe Harry Oakes, who'd just moved from number two on the news desk to take over features. Harry had been around, and there was no love lost between him and Sam Foreacre, so that little smirk of his whenever the subject came up, more or less let me know that deep down he appreciated my stroke of journalistic enterprise, and that would be our secret. So when the back bench were casting around for a scribe to cover the war at sea, old Harry must've played his trump and reminded the wise ones of the Sid Rawlings saga and my ability to beat the opposition into a cocked hat on a salty yarn. Well anyway, that's the best explanation I can come up with, and until somebody tells me different, I'll always go the extra mile for old Harry. In this game a rabbi's worth his weight in gold, particularly when your reputation as a red-hot reporter is based on a work of fiction.

  ISP Internet Content Management Services

  Extract from website http//www.dchron.com/chat

  WEBLOG: Trafthread

  Posted by S Tilbury

  Hello, I'm Susan and I'm a fifth year college student. Can you tell me where you are and what it's like on the ship?

  Pretty: Well Susan I can't tell you exactly where we are because we don't want the enemy to know that do we. But I can tell you that we are sailing off the southern coast of Spain and things on the ship are good, everybody knows their job and they spend a lot of time practicing gun drills and adjusting the sails so that we keep on course. All best wishes to everyone at your college

  Posted by T Evans

  I liked your feature in the Chronicle John, only you didn’t mention the kind of food you eat aboard ship. I am very interested and would like to know how you manage a balanced diet when you are away from land for so long. Do you eat a lot of fish?

  Pretty: Thanks for that Tim. Yes we eat fish sometimes, but we have plenty of provisions on board; we have our own chickens, sheep and a goat for milk, so we manage quite well. We take on vegetables and fruit and make supplies last as long as we can, but the main thing we have to be careful of is using too much fresh water when we don’t know how long we'll be at sea. Water really is precious so when it rains we rig canvas awnings to catch water and replenish our supply. We can certainly stay out a long time if we have to but eventually the diet will be down to salt pork and ship's biscuits called hard tack, you can imagine why

  Posted by N Jones

  Can you explain how the ship sails if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction?

  Pretty: That’s a tough one Norman. I'm not much of a sailor, but I know a man who is, the ship's Sailing Master who's an expert on setting and adjusting the various combinations of sails so that we go in the right direction. If we need to go into the wind we wear and tack on and off in a zigzag using the rudder and sails. As you can imagine there's a skill to all of this, which rakes years to develop, involving moving the sails around through a complex system of rigging and block and tackles. I don't pretend to understand exactly how it works, but unless there's a dead calm we get there all right. If we are completely becalmed then the ship’s boats go ahead and tow us along by what you'd call rowing, and the sailors call pulling, hence the expression more power to your elbow.

  Posted by C Gerrard

  I'm making a model of HMS Victory - can you tell me what colours to use?

  Pretty: Well the flagship's hull is mostly a matt black colour divided by three bands of yellow ochre so she's really distinctive. Under sail she looks like a wasp with huge white wings. Most of the carved work is yellow and black too and the gun ports are black on the outside and dull red on the inside. Oh, and the figurehead is quite complicated, the cherubs are soft white, the scrollwork blue and gold and the royal arms are in heraldic colours. Cannons and ironwork all dull black of course. Hope this helps.

  Posted by J Frost

  What a waste of time and taxpayers money. If I had my way the fleet would be recalled, the ships scrapped and chopped up for firewood and Nelson given his marching orders. We're going into Europe anyway, so why fight it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for peddling such jingoistic rubbish when there are beggars starving on the streets of Southwark. It's a downright disgrace.

  Pretty: I'm only a reporter Julian, you might want to e-mail your MP about that.

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