A Tale of the High Seas

Today has been an unmusical day, except that I played lots of Mozart and Beethoven and Bach and Chopin at home. I sightread parts of Chopin's preludes and études, because I figure that I should try to disciplined-ly learn a piece, from memory, with dynamics, with proper fingering, proper timing, and everything. The last time I tried this was a year or so ago with a Schubert impromptu; it's only one page and a half long, but I only memorized about two staffs(?) and of those I'm starting to forget the fingering -- not because I'm an imbecile but because I seldom had the self-discipline to look at the piece with severe objectivity.

In the morning I worked on a story that I started yesterday,which is about a mid-eighteenth-century British navy ship and its captain. The ship had started out from Portsmouth with a full crew and an insecure, cruel captain. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic the crew mutinied, imprisoned their captain and second officer, and dropped them off at the nearest port. The former first officer has taken over the command. He is a man of a powerful mind, few words, and a very strong code of honour, who inspires the respect and allegiance of nearly everyone he meets. Like Napoleon(?), he has acquired the habit of only sleeping about three hours every night, and making up for the rest with cat naps throughout the day; he mostly spends his hours carefully watching the ship and its crew, and brooding over maps and reading books in his cabin. His first act as de facto captain is to give each crew member a large sum of gold and permit them to stay at the next large port. The crew members who are money-greedy and alcoholic all tumble into town and decide to stay for a round of riotous living, whereas the more desirable crew members keep the money for their families and merely purchase a few necessary items before returning to the ships. And this is exactly the result that the first officer had intended. So now the smaller but congenial crew are roaming the oceans, trying to avoid being spotted by English warships for fear of being engaged in a battle, and perhaps (I still have to consider the ethics of this) lightening the loads of the French warships that pass. Maybe they could come across a bona fide pirate ship . . . Anyway, at the point where the story starts, the ship is about to encounter another ship in distress, and rescue the people on board.

One problem with this story is that (as J. also pointed out) pirate and navy stories have often been done before. And much of the nautical knowledge that I'm using is what I've collected from fiction over the years, though yesterday I did begin reading Richard Hough's biography of Captain James Cook, which my aunt gave me many years ago. I'll try to read contemporary literature to get a sense of the language and thought at the time; I will also try to use period dialect, and even give crew members different dialects because they come from different parts of England. The first officer already has an educated English, one of the crew will have a Yorkshire accent (taken from Shirley), another perhaps a Somersetshire accent (out of Lorna Doone), yet another perhaps a Cockney accent (taken from Evelina), and so on and so forth. I don't think that copying accents from other books is unethical, is it? But, either way, I am going to try to make this very much my own story, though of course it will end up resembling dozens of other stories (The Sea-Hawk or Captain Hornblower, for instance) -- if I ever continue it, that is.