Hey there, pirates! I got a pretty decent response on my Facebook page about my previous post, 6 Useless Facts About The Devil’s Luck, Chapter 1, so I’m moving on to more chapters and more useless (but fun, I hope!) trivia.

I have ten tidbits for you from Chapter 2, but I suspect it will vary, since I’m just picking out notable details as I go. Hope you find it as nerdily fascinating as I did!

 

Fact: I live in the US. Have all my life. My parents, too. And their parents, on and on back to the Mayflower. What can I say, we don’t move around much. My point is, I’m used to American spellings of words. When I was mid-way through writing this story, however, I got it in my head that since the year was 1716, and all of my characters are British, perhaps I should use the spellings of my Motherland. Let’s face it, no one in 1716 was clamoring for anything, without their trusty ‘u’ along to guide them.

So off I went to Wikipedia to thoroughly pore through an article detailing spelling differences on either side of the Atlantic. Veeery interesting. Harbor/harbour gets used a lot in The Devil’s Luck, and I never realized how much I say realise when I write. And then there are other fun words like plow/plough, maneuver/manouever. Also, skeptical spelled sceptical still looks weird to me. Those and so, so many others. I also learned that Americans weirdly bunch together words like forever and anyway (elsewhere they’re for ever and any way).

I painstakingly searched my document (only 108K words, mind you) for any word that might need changing and made the modifications. It was only after the story was done that I realized (yes, there’s my pesky American ‘z’ again) I could switch the proofing language to UK English in Word and not have to kill myself looking for all of what needed to be changed. Sigh. Live and learn, eh?

When the first inklings of this story came into my head, I only knew I wanted to write a pirate story. Because I am obsessed with the both the actual history and the glorified silly pop-culture of all things Age of Sail and Golden Age of Piracy. I have my theories as to why, but those are for a far stranger blog than this. I knew, however, from perusing a few pirate romances on my own (mostly to feel out what material was already out there in an attempt to not inadvertently duplicate someone else’s plot), that the standard trope is for the captain to take the heroine prisoner and then they end up falling in love, or at least lust.

I thought, what about more than just the captain? There’s a ton of men on the ship, and I like hearing about some group sex, why not a threesome? And then my poor brain started boiling away, looking for a way to make that happen so that the captain wasn’t just pimping her out to his friends, but that all parties could be genuinely interested in one another, and (the real challenge) the two men don’t get jealous of each other.

Thus, Benjamin Till was born. I wanted him to sort of be the one to convince her that Blackburn wasn’t necessarily the jerk he seemed at first, and our dear Hannah would end up falling for both of them, as they both enchant her in different ways. Here’s a snippet of the first time you see Benjamin easing into this role, in his attempts to calm her down a bit in that take place in Chapter 2:

Yes, I learned during my nautical research that all rope aboard a ship is referred to as “line.” And now you know.

 

For the bulk of the story, the characters are all aboard The Devil’s Luck, a “galleon of middling size,” as I described it in Chapter 1. What I needed was a constant reminder of the layout of such a ship (generally), so I could give readers a clear sense of where everyone was going as they moved from cabin to cabin, from the helm down to the lower gun deck, from the forecastle all the way down to the hold.

This image on the right is the one I used, consistently throughout the story to keep my head straight. The two diagrams were of third rate (exterior view) and first rate (interior) ships of war, drawn in 1728, which was as close as I could find to the year of my story, at least with such detail. You can view the huge, detailed, full size image here. See if you can pick out where Edmund’s stateroom was!

 

More learning for me. We always see in the movies the pirate captain poring over charts and busting out his trusty sextant, and while that did happen in real life, what was preferred, I learned, was for the ship to acquire its own designation Navigator, a person with specialized knowledge.

I found this referenced in a number of places, but one site, SheppeyPirates.co.uk, put it rather well:

In fact, the site pointed out just how much skill a person would need, and even then there was a lot of stabbing in the dark:

6. We’re only pretending the captain’s in charge.

Some captains were voted out and removed for not being aggressive enough for their crews, while others were abandoned by their crews for being too bloodthirsty and brutal. Pirate Captain’s were expected to be bold and decisive in battle as well as e skilled in navigation and seamanship. Above all they had to have the force of personality necessary to hold together such an unruly bunch of seamen.

The general rule was that during times of battle the Captain retained unlimited authority, but at all other times he and the rest of the crew were subject to the command of the Quartermaster.

7. Writers love words. Sometimes too much.

I don’t know. Sometimes I latch on to weird ones. What do you think?

Sure the plot of the story is a figment of my imagination, but the surrounding history I wanted to leave as real as possible. And to do that, I like to lace in historical events. Here’s one I wove into this chapter:

True story: there actually was a huge earthquake in 1692 that did just that, bringing the center of commerce in Jamaica from Port Royal to Kingston. Part of my rationale for including dates like this is to enable the reader to figure out how old characters are, if they want to do the math. So Edmund was eight when the 1692 was still four years away, that makes him 12 in 1692, and 36 at the time of our story in 1716. So he was born in 1680. Whew!

The clues for the rest are in there, Benjamin being two years older than Edmund makes him 38 in the story and born in 1678. And Hannah I cheat and flat-out tell you she’s 28 in Chapter 1, but that was mostly because I wanted the Literotica gods to be sure I was writing about characters who were of legal age. Never can be too careful!

And speaking of 1692, I’m currently writing a new story that takes place in that year. Can you guess what it’s about?

I think those of us in the developed nations have really come to take readily available, fresh water for granted. I found out, once again learning about life aboard a ship, that this was simply not the case. For some reason I can’t find the link to the original site where I learned this, but fresh water was stored in barrels aboard a ship, and it had a tendency to start growing algae and going bad, so it would be used up at the beginning of a longer voyage. Thus there was so much drinking of alcohol. Plus…pirates.

Edmund notes this when he’s approaching Hannah shortly after having her taking down from the mast:

A reader, who clearly saw better into my own subconscious than I did, asked me if the ship Hannah was originally supposed to board, The Mourning Dove, was symbolic of Hannah herself, as a widow. Riiiiiiight. I meant to do that.

Hannah is a widow, though, but Edmund doesn’t realize it until she tells him. Why?

At that time, it was customary for a woman to wear mourning black for at least a year after the death of her husband, and some of the bereaved took it as far as four years. Talk about lack of wardrobe variety. And then, as if that weren’t enough, they would often dress in grey for another year, and this was referred to as “half mourning.” The black ensemble was typically referred to on the whole as “widow’s weeds.” And as I noted, Hannah is out of such colors by the time of our story.

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OK! So there’s another collection of stuff and nonsense! Hope to see you again for the facts about Chapter 3!