Two mutinies, a man presumably lost overboard, two women crew members and a wreck off the coast of Australia are just some of the colourful incidents in the life of this four-masted, iron-hulled barque which was painted in 1927 by marine artist Jack Spurling. The...
“We were on a coast of centuries of sea tragedies, and of millennia of prehistoric habitation. A great deal of the strange and incomprehensible surrounded one there, and one was credulous of many things that one would not believe elsewhere. Such belief is a form of...
In the months prior to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 the government of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR – the South African Republic) four forts were constructed to defend the capital, Pretoria. One of these, Fort Klapperkop, was built at a...
“There is nothing – absolutely NOTHING – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” From Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows One of my favourite books as a young child was The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. My father...
