Having escaped the pirates and evaded them, Jarvis must now decide whether his damaged ship can safely cross the Atlantic to England. Is it too much for the limited rig and the small crew? Should he put into a port up the coast? Or will his haste to...
I will begin with a summary of the first volume, Noble Intentions.
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In 1718, after a pirate attack in the Gulf of Florida, Jarvis Overton, aged twenty-one, is the only surviving officer aboard Atlantica, a ship that had been owned and captained by his father. The Master's apprentice, Robert Jenson, also survived.
Gillian Cavendish, eighteen, and her lady's companion, Judith Fraser, are among the surviving passengers from Kingston. Gillian's father, the newly appointed Governor of Jamaica, had died on their voyage there, and they were returning to London with her bereft mother, who was among those killed in the pirate attack. With no surviving siblings, Gillian succeeds to her father's title, a Baroness in her own right.
Heavily damaged, disabled and making water, Atlantica is taken in tow toward the pirates' haven, the thirty-five survivors held under armed guard in the forecastle mess. While Jarvis and Jenson comfort the two women, they contrive a plan for the crew to retake their ship. With cunning distraction, they overpower the two guards, and with interrogation information, deception and patience, they capture the remainder of the pirates who had been left aboard.
Many hours later, in the darkness before moonrise, they sever the towing hawser and drift northward in the Florida Current, hoping to be unnoticed as the pirates continue tacking across the Gulf toward their Bahamas haven.
Meanwhile, in this framework of inventive thinking and cunning action, the central plot has unfolded. Since the beginning of the voyage, Gillian has been smitten with Jarvis, and he is strongly attracted to her. Believing it essential that Gillian wed a nobleman or an heir to a title, her mother was stern in ensuring no interaction with Jarvis, whom she called a sailor and a commoner.
Jarvis' father imposed a strict rule against the crew fraternising with passengers. With him among those killed in the attack, Jarvis struggles with both grief and the realisation that he is now in command of what remains of the ship, and he is responsible for the safety of all aboard.
Besides toppling the fore topmast and disabling the mizzen, the major damage to the ship was starboard aft, the accommodation and quarters for the officers and passengers. With the port side undamaged, Jarvis moves Gillian, Judith and Jenson to the captain's quarters and the four male passengers to the mates' accommodation below.
Gillian, conflicted between grief and desire, is unrestrained in seeking comfort from Jarvis. As much as he wants to yield to her increasingly blatant advances, he holds true to his duty to the ship and all aboard. His noble intentions attract her all the more.
Having evaded their captors, they repair the rigging sufficiently to sail northward to Cayo Bizcayno, an islet on the Florida coast, where they find bottom, careen and stanch the leaking hull.
Gillian has recently finished her pubertal changes and is completely inexperienced and uninformed. Jarvis, having spent the past years immersed in his studies at Oxford, is equally naïve. The intensity of the situation adds to the intensity of their attraction, and in their innocence, they pledge their troth. The story continues with their often humorous adventures as they sort out the meaning of being betrothed.
With the hull repaired, their departure is delayed by the foreboding of an approaching violent storm. They secure the ship in a slot among the mangroves and weather the hurricane.
The pirate ship, Jupiter, from which they severed the tow to escape, is not so fortunate, and she blows back across the Gulf to founder on the reef south of the islet. As Atlantica prepares to sail homeward, the wreck is sighted and identified, and thus, ends the first volume of this story.
A few hours short of three days elapsed from the opening to the closing of this first volume of the story. With so much detail in such a short time, this precis cannot serve it justice, and I recommend you read Noble Intentions before beginning this sequel.
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I have chosen to write the story in a facsimile of the language spoken during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. English at that time consisted of only forty thousand words, and some of their spellings and meanings differ from our current ones. Contractions were rarely used at that time except among the vulgar, so my dialogues may seem stiff, though not as stiff as Shakespeare's a century earlier. My chosen style differs from that of Jane Austen a century after my story is set, and I hope mine is seen as less awkward.
In 2009, the one-millionth word was added to the English language, so I have restricted myself to using only four per cent of the words available. Culling the other ninety-six per cent is a labour of love, so please point out any usages you find to be non-historic.
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