venta | The books I read will never be bestsellers but come on, fellers, at least we made our choice

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The books I read will never be bestsellers but come on, fellers, at least we made our choice

Book #6 (as recommended by

shui_long): Lois McMaster Bujold - The Paladin of Souls

The Curse of Chalion already came up on the list in February, and Paladin of Souls is the next book in the series.

I think the central character of this book - Ista, the mad dowager who suddenly became a lot less mad when the curse from the first book was lifted - is actually really interesting. And although a lot of the book's plot comes from the intervention of the gods in Ista's life, there's also a lot of entirely non-fanastyland interest as she struggles with other people's expectations of how she should live her life.

I quite enjoyed the first book, and if anything I think this one was better.

Book #7 (as recommended by

waistcoatmark): Robin McKinley - Sunshine

For reasons I am completely unable to justify, I read Sunshine under the impression it was the one

valkyriekaren had recommended, and of which she said "vampires, but not sparkly emo ones".

And lo, it did contain vampires who were not sparkly or emo, and were more ravening monsters. Except, of course, the one our heroine meets, who is honourable and protective and all that stuff.

However! It turns out that this book was in fact recommended by Waistcoatmark, and he described it as "Girl meets vampire". And despite the fact it is that story, it's really done quite well. It has some light forays into explaining the metaphysics of vampires, werewolves, etc, rather than expecting you will just accept that a 200-pound bloke can become a 100-pound wolf once a month. However, it doesn't get too technical, so avoids the problem that explaining such a thing coherently is really bloody difficult :)

Although the plot is largely vampire-driven, the book does contain a well-drawn world filled with real characters, who just happen to have all this magical crap going on around them. I really enjoyed it. (And probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been expecting something different.)

Book #8 (as recommended by

damerell): C.S. Forester - The Happy Return

The Happy Return was, I think, the first Hornblower novel written, although it isn't chronologically the first in the sequence.

I felt I got what I expected - a good, naval romp with lots of broadside attacks, stiff upper lips, and maritime disaster while dressing for dinner. Despite having never read any Hornblower novels before, it's a sufficiently frequent reference point that it already seemed familiar. I enjoyed it, and found it actually had rather more depth than I'd expected. However... (and this is going to get rather long)...

I remember reading Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands years ago and commenting that it was full of nautical stuff that I just didn't understand. I can usually get the drift of what's going on, but I just don't have the sailing terminology or knowledge to follow the details through.

By way of example... we join Hornblower on the deck of the Lydia. The anchor is being hauled up, and he is about to discover something unwelcome:

A shudder ran through the ship, the capstan swung round so sharply that the hands at the bars fell in a tumbling heap to the deck. 'Messenger's parted, sir', hailed Gerard from the forecastle. 'The anchor's foul, I think, sir."

OK, the anchor's fouled. I get that. It's stuck on something. We already knew that the ship's boys were hauling in "cable and messenger". What is a messenger?

Hornblower decides he could cut the cable and abandon the anchor, but he's unwilling to do that. Instead:

'Pass the small bower cable for a messenger,' he shouted.

They then do some hot and unpleasant work "down in the cable tier" getting the cable and manhandling it up to the capstan. There is a lot of swearing until someone says the messenger is ready.

Er... right. Wikipedia, he say "Messenger, a tool attached to a capstan used to raise the anchor cables on 17th–19th century sailing ships". And apparently Hornblower thinks it can be replaced, in emergency, with some form of cable. I have no idea how. Anyway, they start a-heaving again and realise that instead of pulling the anchor up, they're pulling the ship down.

He would have to sail the anchor out of the ground - a delicate manoeuvre involving peril to masts and rigging, and which might end in a ridiculous fiasco.

So, he assesses the tide and the wind and so on, and issues his orders.

The topmen raced aloft to set the foretopsail; with that and the driver he could get sternway upon the ship. Harrison stood by the capstan ready to let the cable go with a run and then second to have it hove in like lightning when the ship came forward again.

Now... I think "way" on a ship is probably approximately equivalent to momentum. Sternway is going-backwards-ness. So, he's set the sails such that the ship is going to sail backwards, with the anchor cable unwinding as she goes.

his mind juggling with a dozen factors at once - the drag of the cable on the bows, the pressure of the wind on the driver and the backed foretopsail, the set of the tide, the increasing sternway, the amount of cable still to run out.

'Hard-a-starboard,' he rasped at the qaurtermaster at the wheel, and then to the hands forward 'Smartly with the braces now'.

Goodness only knows what the braces do.

With the rudder hard across the ship came round a trifle. The foretopsail came round. The jibs and forestaysails were set like lightning. There was a shuddering moment before the ship paid off. Her sternway checked; the ship hesitated, and then, joyfully, began slowly to move forward close-hauled. Up aloft, every sail that could draw was being set as Hornblower barked his orders. The capstan clanked ecstatically as Harrison's men raced round with the bars gathering the cable again.

Hornblower had a moment to think now, with the ship gathering forward way. The drag of the cable would throw her all aback if he gave her the last chance. He was concious of a rapid beating of his heart as he watched the maintopsail for the first signs of flapping. It took all his force of will to keep his voice from shaking as he gave his orders to the helmsman. The cable was coming in fast; the next crisis was at hand, which would see the anchor out of the ground or the Lydia dismasted. He nerved himself for it, judged his moment, and then shouted for all sail to be got in.

Our crew is fortunately well-drilled, and they get all the sail in quickly.

Courses, topsails and topgallants were got in during the few seconds which were left, and as the last shred of canvas disappeared a fresh order from Hornblower brought the ship round, pointing straight into the wind and towards the hidden anchor, the way she had gathered carrying her slowly forward.

I am, frankly, a bit adrift. Have we just gone backwards and forward again? The ship is now pointing straight into the wind, but which way was she formerly pointing? I'm unsure how far round "a trifle" was, and whether it was directly relevant.

I'm unsure why the masts were at risk. Does the cable end up across the ship? Is there a risk associated with the ship pointing the wrong way - maybe too much wind in the sail could wrench the mast? Why would a sail flapping be indicative of anything in particular?

I'm sure captains of sailing ships, or people who wished to be captains of sailing ships when such a job was viable, would follow all that with no trouble at all. I, however, am frequently left wallowing in the backwash.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No idea about most of the naval stuff, but:

I'm unsure why the masts were at risk.

...is because if the ship is anchored and the anchor holds then the force generated by the sails pulls at the masts but the ship cannot move in response to this force, so there is a risk it may break the mast.

There is some help at hand with "The Hornblower Companion" (also written by CSF), but the books have a difficult balancing act between plausible dialogue and not completely baffling the layman. Patrick O'Brien (who is not in any case writing a Hornblower clone because the whole point of Hornblower is that he's The Man Alone) has Maturin as a lay observer, but fumbles the ball completely by spattering the dialogue and text with every obscure Georgian naval term he can come up with, leaving me all aback^W^W confused let alone the hypothetical reader who isn't interested in age-of-Sail navies anyway [1].

I realise the book is read and the confusion had, but:

The capstan just hauls in ropes. A messenger is, in this period, basically a loop of rope. Half the loop runs taut between the capstan and the cable to be hauled in, which it's attached to with nippers, which are basically clamps. As the cable's hauled in by tension on the messenger, the slack in the other half of the messenger can be nipped further along the target cable, while nippers are released at the other end of the clamped section, basically walking it along the target cable as it comes into the ship. The target cable can't just be hauled in by the capstan because it runs from a strong fixed point inside the ship to the anchor, and isn't wanted _at_ the capstan; but the messenger will get it into or onto the ship where it can be manhandled into the desired position.

In an emergency any old bit of strong-enough rope would do, but wouldn't be as convenient because it wouldn't have this loop.

The "braces" are ropes whereby men on deck can control the angle of the sails; they don't just face directly forward on a square-rigger. They're attached to the ends of the yards.

We know we have just gone backwards and forwards, because the ship was "gathering forward way". Basically we went backwards in the direction of the wind (pretty well the only direction we can controlledly go backwards, with the rudder at the wrong end of the ship) to get a long way from the anchor. Then we put the rudder right over to turn the ship, and arranged sails on the front of the ship to keep turning, in order to end up at an angle from the wind where the ship can sail forwards (about 60 to 70 degrees on a square-rigger) - then arranged all the sails so that the ship would sail forwards, "close-hauled" (meaning at that angle of 60 to 70 degrees from the oncoming wind, as close to facing into it as we can). Once we were moving rapidly we took all the sails down then turned directly into the wind, hoping that the momentum would pull the anchor out of the ground.

The masts are in peril because they are constructed to withstand steady pressure but not sharp jerks. A ship that ran aground or that collided with another ship would often be damaged aloft as the masts whiplashed forwards; if the anchor hadn't come out of the ground, the ship might have stopped very abruptly.

[1] Disclaimer: ~everyone but CEB and me seems to love Patrick O'Brien so who knows?

Thank you! That was still a bit of a struggle (for someone who has little grasp of the mechanics of sailing), though much more comprehensible now.

It still sounds like a shocking gamble, if you don't know what the anchor is fouled on. If it's actually caught on an object (like, I dunno, a wreck of some former overly-optimistic captain's vessel) then this won't help. It's only useful if it's stuck in such a way that a sharp tug would release it. Maybe a sensible captain knows the likelihood of wreckage, krakens, shopping trollies etc in the deeps catching his anchor, but I'm surprised at the idea that it's ever worth the risk.

It also dawned on me that I have very little grasp which end of the ship the anchor is attached to. I initially assumed stern, but actually think my mental image of a ship has a porthole sort of affair for the anchor near the ~~front~~ bow.

Edited 2013-05-07 13:16 (UTC)

The anchor's also limited in strength, and the odds are good (I infer) that this operation will bend it rather than break the ship. The porthole affair is a "hawse-hole".

Typically the ship has two "bower" anchors mounted ready for use, one on either side of the bow, the "best" and "small"... which terminology distinguishes the side of the ship they are mounted on, not their size or quality, which is typically identical. Which is a bit mad, but there you go. Ordinarily they would be attached to something in the bows of the ship in use, so that the ship would drift bows to wind; but they could be attached to the stern, so the ship would face the other way around. The ship might also have spare anchors (of identical type), stored below decks ready to replace the bower anchors if they were lost; on a long expedition, Lydia almost certainly does.

In the case of a surprise attack, the anchor cable would be cut; it takes far too long to hoist one normally. A ship might anchor at the stern if anticipating an attack from a direction such that the immediate need would be to go downwind.

And, while I don't think it comes up in The Happy Return, a "spring" runs from a capstan the other end of the ship to the anchor cable; by pulling in or paying out the spring, the ship can be turned while at anchor to bring her guns to bear.

I did consider attempting to drag you up to our bathroom while in Whitby, so I could point at bits of HMS Victory and ask similar anchor-, mast- and cable-related questions. I'm not sure it was quite the right era (in fact, I'm not sure offhand which of the many Victorys it was - a quick count of the gun ports in my pic of the model suggests one of the 100-gun ones) but figured it had lots of sails, the basic premise was probably still the same :)

I presume most nautical terminology started out as a first mate's idea of an in-joke, and then stuck. And then they kept it, just to make sure that they could immediately identify people like me who just thought it was a bit of old rope or an equivalent-quality anchor.

one of the 100-gun ones

... and thus presumably, the famous one.

Another delighful oddity is the early 19th-century practice of putting steam engines in ships very like those. Needless to say, this did occasionally result in quite serious amounts of comedy.

That was labelled "Victory 1805" (the year of Trafalgar), and while I only saw it briefly, did appear to be _the_ Victory (although another terminological oddity is that she is a "three-decker" of "100 guns" which means neither that she has three decks nor that she has 100 guns - it means three gun-decks, and that her nominal rate is 100 guns, the calculation of nominal rate being similar but not identical to the number of guns aboard).

I think it's more that not enough time passed - if the age of sail had lasted a bit longer we'd just think of "best" and "small" as synonyms for "left" and "right", like "port" and "starboard".

Another favourite insanity there is that "port" used to be called "larboard", which just might be confused with "starboard" in a noisy environment; and that steering orders were given as manipulating a tiller, so "hard-a-starboard" above is an order which if the ship were moving forward would cause her to turn to port, or "larboard", and means the helmsmen should turn the wheel to port. I've read a reasonably plausible theory about the loss of the Titanic which suggests this confusion was to blame.

I don't feel that the three-decker 100-gun description is any more ridiculous than the 1000 vs. 1024 confusions we have with Megabytes and so on these days :)

I did know about larboard, though I don't think I knew about the tiller/wheel potential confusion. It does all smack rather of an institution which cared rather more about tradition and continuity than, er, continued existence.

Actually, I think that one's fair enough. You start saying to men with tillers what they should do with their tillers, because their job is to provide muscles to move tillers not look at what the ship is doing (although by the Georgian era the helmsman is a skilled job - but circle of reincarnation, in WW2 the helmsman is in the bowels of the ship and can't see a thing, getting instructions from the bridge). Now you're stuck - if you ever change the backwards terminology, there will be a period of hopeless confusion. It's like how "clipless" pedals for bicycles have special clips in them.

Sailing the anchor out isn't quite so much of a risk because if you think of the curved shape of the anchor, and how that's probably rotated as it's moved in between two immovable things like a couple of rocks, then if you pull it from the same direction it originally settled from, then you're using the curve to help it slide back out and so come lose. That is, it's only stuck if you're trying to lift it from directly above, or from downstream of where it got hooked. And if you want to get back upstream of it to pull it out, the only way to do that is to sail.

Oh, if a sail is flapping it's not taut with wind. This is probably not good. Either the wind has dropped, or it's misaligned, or we've turned too close to the wind and aren't close-hauled anymore but instead In Trouble.

It's usually that you're too close to the wind. Having done enough sailing to have seen this first-hand, I think of flapping as specifically when the leading edge starts to flap, which is when you've gone too close. General limpness caused by dropping wind shouldn't really involve flapping, as you can set a sail in just about anything that isn't a dead calm if you try.

...Really want to be able to say Patrick O'Brien is better for this, because of how much I love Patrick O'Brien (sorry) but because I'd done some sailing before I ever read anything I don't know how much I knew already. Stuff like way and the cocked hat and springs and how all the wind works and stuff, I'm sure, so it was only stuff like the fine workings of the capstan and messenger that I had to learn.

I think it helped that I had read Swallows and Amazons (all of the books) first, where a lot of terminology is explained by one character to another (quite justifiably, but handy for the reader); I didn't have to wonder what "steerage way" is, or anything.

I read Forester first and O'Brien second, and I found the O'Brien much less comprehensible (though I have only read the first one, maybe he gets less nautical thesaurus in subsequent books).

I feel I should point out - that for once - I got the song lyric.

This does not happen often. :-)

Much more credible - last time it happened, it was the Beautiful South!

Honest (http://venta.livejournal.com/108642.html).

(I promise I'm not actually a scary stalker with a file on everyone - I just happened to be searching my journal for references to penguins a couple of days ago :) That post stuck in my head because I didn't recognise my own subject line, having apparently removed all Beautiful South lyrics from my consciousness.)

Ok - that is scary!

Also am I more credible or you less?

I think we can safely conclude that we're both more credible than we were in (yikes!) 2004.

I think the central character of this book - Ista, the mad dowager who suddenly became a lot less mad when the curse from the first book was lifted - is actually really interesting.

Yes, I love Ista.

I quite enjoyed the first book, and if anything I think this one was better.

I do too. I recommended the first one because I feel they need to be read in order. (Although perhaps I should have recommended the second and just said that...)

Yes, I remembered you saying that you preferred the second. Don't worry, I shall assign equal merit to you and

shui_long for the recommendation :)

I confess that when reading Hornblower and the like I usually just treat the jargon as flavour text rather than trying to think too much about what's actually happening...

Goodness only knows what the braces do.

Keep the ship straight when it's in the teeth of a gale?

(I'm mostly baffled by this sort of stuff too, but I can quite happily read and let it just wash over me.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The books I read will never be bestsellers but come on, fellers, at least we made our choice

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