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THE KYDD SEA ADVENTURES, BY JULIAN STOCKWIN
JULIAN STOCKWIN
A KYDD SEA ADVENTURE
MCBOOKS PRESS, INC.
ITHACA, NEW YORK
www.mcbooks.com
Published by McBooks Press 2007
Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Copyright © 2007 Julian Stockwin
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.
Cover painting by Geoff Hunt
Dust jacket and interior design by Panda Musgrove
The hardcover edition of this book was cataloged by the Library of Congress as:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stockwin, Julian. The admiral's daughter : a Kydd sea adventure / by Julian Stockwin. p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59013-143-5 (alk. paper)
1. Kydd, Thomas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History, Naval—18th century—Fiction. 3. Seafaring life—Fiction. 4. Sailors—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6119.T66A36 2007 823'.92—dc22
2007013183
Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com. Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
YE GENTLEMEN OF ENGLAND THAT LIVE AT HOME AT EASE, AH! LITTLE DO YOU THINK UPON THE DANGERS OF THE SEAS.
CHAPTER 1
NICHOLAS RENZI NODDED to the man sharing with him the warmth of the log fire at the Angel posting-house and regarding his deep tan with suspicion. It was not an attribute often seen in England after a hard winter. Renzi was newly returned from tumultuous experiences on the other side of the world that had left him questioning his reason. He had sailed to New South Wales as a free settler, determined to forge a new life there, but it was not to be. And now, in just a little while, he would see Cecilia . . .
The ship that had brought him home had docked three days ago and, having signed off on the voyage, he and Thomas Kydd had made for Guildford. It had been cowardly of him, Renzi acknowledged, to have asked his friend to arrive first to prepare his sister for their sudden reappearance. Cecilia had nursed him through a deadly fever and touched his heart, but such was his respect for her that he had vowed to achieve something in the world before he made his feelings known to her, and had left without a word.
He had laboured long and hard to try to create an Arcadia of his small landholding for Cecilia, in that raw land. Eventually Kydd had rescued him: he had suggested that Renzi make use of his education by devoting himself to the elucidation of natural philosophy from a new standpoint. Where Rousseau and his peers had pontificated from the comforts of rarefied academia, Renzi's studies would be rooted in the harsh reality of the wider world, which he had encountered at first hand in places as varied as the Caribbean and the vast South Seas, the sylvan quiet of Wiltshire and the alien starkness of Terra Australis.
He would distil his observations and experiences into a series of volumes on the extraordinary variety of human response to the imperatives of hunger and aggression, religion and security—all the threats and challenges that were the lot of man on earth . . . That would be an achievement indeed to lay before Cecilia and, it must be confessed, it was a prospect most congenial to himself.
This he would owe to Kydd, who had said he would employ his friend as secretary aboard whichever ship Kydd might captain.
For Renzi, performing this role—more of a clerk than anything— was a small price to pay for the freedom it bestowed on him; he had learned the tricks in Spanish Town long ago and knew that his duties would not be onerous. He had never set store by the petty vanities of rank and was glad to withdraw discreetly from the hurly- burly of tasking and discipline to be found on deck. Above all, he and Kydd, old friends, would continue to adventure together . . .
A boy brought the other man's pot of flip, beer spiked with rum, and looked doubtfully at Renzi, who shook his head and stared into the fire. It was all very well to have found for himself an agreeable position but the wider world was now filled with menace: the recently concluded hostilities had ended with the worst possible consequences. Prime Minister William Pitt had been replaced by Henry Addington, whose panicked response to the spiralling cost of the Revolutionary War was to trade away all of England's hard-won conquests round the world for
