Chapter One

I have wanted to write a book for a while, and it was only in the last year that the idea came to me to write a historical novel based on a true story that took place on my Grandfather's first voyage as a merchant seaman in the early 1900's.

Before I begin on the real story, please bare with me as I provide some background to this story, one that involves great voyages in the last days of sail, fire at sea, shipwreck, and all on a ship that seemed doomed from the start.

I never knew my grandfather on my father's side. He died in 1953 at the age of 68, the year before I was born, and the family never really talked about him. As a result I never got to learn any family history from his earlier days, other than I remember having been told as a small boy that he was a sailor and one of the last Cape Horner's, having sailed around Cape Horn in a sailing ship.

After the death of my mother in 1997 I inherited all the old family photographs and documents, many of which were of my father's family.

By the time I began to research my family history, and to scan the family photographs and other documents into my computer, and wanted to know more about some of the items that I had found, my father had already begun to get ill, which affected his memory. We were to find out months later that he had cancer, and I lost him before I could fill in any of the blanks.

My father was the eldest of three brothers, and while the next in line passed away in the 1980's, the youngest of the three is still alive, but sadly he never really got to know his father either.

As was the tradition with many middle class families in England in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, children, boys especially, were sent away to boarding school. As I myself heard my grandmother often say, "Little boys should be seen and not heard".

Therefore up to their late teenage years, my father and his middle brother spent much of their time away at school. The youngest of the three, who is eight years younger than my father, went straight from school into the army, during World War Two, and it was only after he left the army in the late 1940's that he spent any time at home with his parents, and got to know his father at all.

As fate would have it, my grandfather had suffered a stroke prior to this, and so although my uncle was able to spend time with him, my grandfather was unable to speak, and so any information about his childhood, his voyages around the world prior to the First World War, and his service in the Royal Navy Reserve during the war, all has now been lost.

All that is left are photographs, several photo albums that may well prove valuable to a museum, as they show my grandfather on board armed trawlers during the First World War, but these are not what led me to want to write this story.

Along with the photographs were some documents, records of the ships that my grandfather had sailed on, including one that was on fancy paper and typed, that described the ports of call for the ship, which left Liverpool in 1903, and the few words that didn't catch my eye until I had looked at this a few times "and was wrecked on a reef in the Pacific".

About five years have passed since I realized that my grandfather was shipwrecked on a sailing ship in the Pacific, and during that time I have tried to search for information on the internet, but other than finding some very sketchy information on the ship itself, I got nowhere until about six months ago, when I found some digitized newspapers for the period, and some information in a number of articles, that when pieced together make quite an amazing story.

The story that I managed to piece together from a number of newspaper articles is more than a shipwreck. It is a number of unfortunate events, where fate seemed to be trying to send the ship and the crew to their doom.

A number of the events that took place are only mentioned in a single article that was published in a single newspaper, and so trying to piece together the facts, and enough information to write a story has not been easy. Amazingly enough, a single article did list all the members of the ship's crew, and last on the list, my grandfather, a ship's apprentice.

It is the unusual facts about the ship and the voyage, that made me think of writing a book, and even before pen hit paper (or to be honest fingers hit keyboard, but it doesn't sound as good), my mind went racing ahead thinking about the book becoming a Hollywood Blockbuster movie, somewhere between Titanic and Master And Commander, and my worries over money when I come to retire would be quelled.

But here we are back at Chapter One, the introduction to the book, first draft, and if a few years from now you see a movie about an ill fated sailing ship that is wrecked in the Pacific, think of me and how you were one of the first to read the story as it unfolded.

This is the first draft of how I see Chapter One of my first book, an introduction and background to the story and why I am writing it.

I hope that you enjoyed the first draft of this introduction to my first book. I would be grateful for any constructive criticism. Praise is also welcomed of course. I have never written a book before, and I really would like to make progress with this, especially while I am hot on the trail, researching to find more information on this intriguing ship and it's voyage.

The one thing I would love to find is the Ship's Log, which hopefully has not been destroyed, and is in a museum or repository somewhere in the UK. If I could have the fortune to find this and to get a copy, I would be able to fill out the story in far more detail with accurate information, instead of having to use facts of my own making.