The Captain S Boy

With his family murdered and his home burned and pillaged, fourteen-year-old Isaiah is plunged into the dangerous world of the American Revolution. on the side of the rebels. Now a part of a cause bigger than himself, Isaiah gradually discovers what it means to be a man.

Traditionally, a woman’s place was never on stormy seas. But actually thousands of dancers, purserettes, doctors, stewardesses, captains and conductresses have taken to the waves on everything from floating palaces to battered windjammers. Their daring story is barely known, even by today’s seawomen.From before the 1750s, women fancying an oceangoing life had either to disguise themselves as cabin ‘boys’ or acquire a co-operative husband with a ship attached. Early pioneers faced superstition and discrimination in the briny ‘monasteries’. Today women captain cruise ships as big as towns and work at the highest level in the global maritime industry.This comprehensive exploration looks at the Merchant Navy, comparing it to the Royal Navy in which Wrens only began sailing in 1991. Using interviews and sources never before published, Jo Stanley vividly reveals the incredible journey across time taken by these brave and lively women salts.

Traditionally, a woman's place was never on stormy seas. But actually thousands of dancers, purserettes, doctors, stewardesses, captains and conductresses have taken to the waves on everything from floating palaces to battered windjammers. Their daring story is barely known, even by today's seawomen. From before the 1750s, women fancying an oceangoing life had either to disguise themselves as cabin 'boys' or acquire a co-operative husband with a ship attached. Early pioneers faced superstition and discrimination in the briny 'monasteries'. Today women captain cruise ships as big as towns and work at the highest level in the global maritime industry. This comprehensive exploration looks at the Merchant Navy, comparing it to the Royal Navy in which Wrens only began sailing in 1991. Using interviews and sources never before published, Jo Stanley vividly reveals the incredible journey across time taken by these brave and lively women salts.

A young boy’s adventure of serving on a merchant ship in the mid 1600’s begins only by chance when he must leave London at 12 years old and move to his grandfather’s house near the sea. These changes open an entirely new life for him where there is world travel, excitement, and a pathway to success. The adventures take him to lands he had barely begun to study in school yet once exposed he knew very soon that this would be the life for him. An amazing life where an opportunity presented itself and even at 12 years of age, he recognized it as something exciting, new, yet challenging, lonely at times, and frightening at times yet he able transcend his fears and excel. His will to perform every job to the best of his ability along with his insatiable thirst for learning allows him recognition at the highest level. This quest provides for further opportunity as it leads to a serendipitous meeting that changes his life even more. This book and its stories were created through my dreams where the question that begs for an answer “what would I have been if I lived in 1650”? With multiple dreams spawning this story, the next question to be answered is “Are these dreams just a collection of stories I have read or seen or if this of my actual past?”. Regardless of the answer, the adventures were all that a growing boy could dream about living in places he had never been in a time he had never known.

Mr Prendergast, an elderly Anglo-Irishman, is living out his last years in the decaying splendour of his family mansion. As his mind wanders through the gloom he finds it peopled with memories of his neglected wife, his pale shadow of a father, his icily glamorous mother and Alexander, the son she so jealously loved, killed in the First World War. With only his ill-tempered alcoholic gardener left to attend to him, Mr Prendergast is content to pass his days in such ghostly company. Until young Diarmid arrives, keen-eyed and carrot-haired, to disperse the gathering darkness with curiosity, and the promise of friendship.