Igenlode Wordsmith

For some reason I had a sudden desire to reread the book
Byron of the Wager (not the famous Lord Byron, but his grandfather, who was a midshipman in Anson's day).

I remembered it as a story about survival after a dramatic wreck; I'd completely forgotten that this happened to be another case of a famous small-boat voyage, where the crew successfully built themselves a new craft in order to sail home after their ship was wrecked in a hostile environment. And my memory apparently wiped a lot of the more gruesome bits...

The story of the crew of the "Wager" is almost the reverse of the story of the survival of Captain Bligh after the mutiny on board the "Bounty". Unlike Bligh's and Shackleton's men, almost all of them died, pretty much as a direct result of the lack of discipline after the mutiny.( Read more... )

I've been flicking through "The Cruise of the 'Conrad'" by Alan Villiers -- which happened to be on the shelf beside Shackleton's "South", and contained exactly what I was looking for in the latter but failed to find, viz. hull and deck plans showing the internal layout of the ship.
(Here are some plans of the "Endurance": http://www.ernestshackleton.net/endurance-expedition/)
Incidentally, I had had no idea that the "Endurance" was originally constructed as a cruise ship to take tourists round the Arctic -- hence why she had so many individual cabins and no cargo hold :-p

But the details of the "Joseph Conrad" were actually much closer to what I was looking for( salvaging an iron ship )

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"An Unfair Advantage" proved immensely and somewhat inexplicably popular (it didn't even benefit from being displayed as part of a "Writers Anonymous" Challenge); between July 16th and July 31st, it received 223 hits from 169 visitors, which I think is probably higher than anything else I've ever posted. Interestingly, people who read "Unfair Advantage" clearly went on to check out "Don Juan Rehearsed" as well, presumably because they were looking for more Piangi-fic; that story got a subsidiary bulge of 32 views/23 visitors!