Hell Around the Horn

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Thanks to my editor, Broos Campbell, and my proofreader, Karen Lorentz. Thanks also for the insight and support of the members of my critique group - Bruce Woods, Ken Kraus, Kelly O'Donnell, Shelley Nolden, Jael McHenry, and Cathy DiCairano. A special thanks also to the authors Joan Druett, Alaric Bond, Linda Collison and Bob McDermott for their valuable comments and guidance. I would also like to thank the readers and contributors to the Old Salt Blog for all their encouragement and support.

Hell Around the Horn is a work of fiction inspired by a particular voyage around Cape Horn by the windjammer British Isles in 1905. (I think that British Isles is a horrible name for a ship so, in the novel, I renamed her Lady Rebecca.) While all the characters in the novel are fictional, many were inspired by the real officers and crew aboard the British Isles. Captain James Pratt Barker, his wife Mary and their children sailed aboard the ship as did, Apprentice William Jones, Mate Rand, Second Mate Atkinson, the Welsh sailor G.H. Harhy, the sail-maker Pugsley and the carpenter Gronberg. The American sailor, Fred Smythe, is a composite of many of the young educated sailors who sailed before the mast in the latter days of sail. He was inspired most directly by Fred Harlow but was also borrowed in part from Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Felix Riesenberg and Basil Lubbock, among others.

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