Cindy Vallar's Blog - Posts Tagged "halifax"

Quarterdeck by Julian Stockwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Following the Battle of Camperdown (October 1797), Thomas Kydd is promoted to lieutenant and assigned to HMS Tenacious, a 64-gun ship-of-the-line. He and his friend, Nicholas Renzi (who now holds the same rank), head to Kydd’s home while the ship undergoes repairs. During this leave, Thomas realizes that if he’s to succeed as a king’s officer, he needs to acquire the traits of a gentleman. An assignment that falls to Nicholas, who believes the request reasonable but nigh unto impossible. Still, with dogged determination, Thomas perseveres and benefits when his sister helps add further polish to his social graces.

When Kydd finally meets his new commander, all his hard work and practice cannot erase the fact that he is a tarpaulin officer (one who begins his career as a seaman who lives on the lower deck). Captain Houghton wants only gentleman officers, men he can rely on to represent the ship and the country appropriately. Therefore, Thomas is being reassigned . . . until urgent orders arrive that prevent that. Consequently, he becomes Tenacious’s fifth lieutenant, the most junior and the one responsible for the signal flags.

Assigned to the North American station, Tenacious leads a convoy of merchant ships west to Halifax. Not even out of sight of England, French privateers cut out slower vessels and it is Kydd who alerts the captain to this intrusion. As the voyage progresses, Thomas feels more and more like an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong among the other officers in the wardroom. It doesn’t help that Nicholas easily fits in and has found someone new with whom to have philosophical discussions. Before long, Thomas feels as if he’s caught between a world in which he doesn’t belong and one to which he can never return.

A misstep in reading the signal flags doesn’t help the situation; it merely serves to intensify the isolation and loneliness that he feels. Yet, what he doesn’t understand is that while he may lack all the social graces that the other officers have, he has knowledge and experience they lack because he has “come aft by the hawse.” This expertise comes in handy when he commands a ship’s boat amidst an ice field blanketed by fog from which the French emerge and fierce hand-to-hand combat ensues.

Thomas’s attitude begins to change during a dinner conversation on the admiral’s ship. Instead of worrying about his social station, he concentrates on becoming as informed as possible about global affairs and how events in one place affect events elsewhere in the world. Then someone from his past emerges who threatens his ability to lead men. Only his knowledge of life on the lower deck allows Thomas to effectively deal with the situation. An encounter with a French frigate with unexpected armament requires his knowledge of navigation and working in a shipyard to protect Achilles and those who serve on her.

Quarterdeck is an excellent account of what it is like to be a fish out of water in a world totally foreign to all that you know. It also shows the intricacies of what is required to be a lieutenant. Along the way, Kydd encounters three people who will influence his life in unexpected ways. One is a relative he has never met. The second is an American who wants the new United States Navy to be as successful as the Royal Navy. The third is a woman whose presence at a royal ball is “either inspired deviltry or the purest ignorance!” (312)

While readers may be unaware of the fact that one aspect of writing is to show how a character matures and changes between the beginning and end of a story, Stockwin does a superb job demonstrating this character arc in Quarterdeck. This allows us to experience the full gamut of emotions that Kydd does, while at the same time, we readily identify with each because in one way or another we’ve felt the same way.


This review originally appeared at Pirates and Privateers (March 2023) at http://www.cindyvallar.com/Stockwin.h...



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