[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="2" gal_title="Endeavour book"] There’s nothing like a book deadline to accelerate time. It hardly seems a moment since I set to work in the British Library in the summer of 2015; or I was paddling about Endeavour Cove in Queen Charlotte’s Sound a few months later; or standing on the foreshore of the...
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Historical Miscellany #42 – A suggestion for a female administration (1766)
27th Jun 2018
Women in (Georgian) politics A hundred years after women won the right to vote in Britain, here's a related snippet from a few centuries earlier. In the mid-1760s the public were exasperated by their politicians. The Treaty of Paris (1763) that brought an end to the Seven Years' War had left Britain in a seemingly commanding...
moreOddingley – John Barnett’s Pigeon House?
11th Jun 2018
A brief post about an old book. It is the best part of a decade since I was writing about the misdeeds of the Oddingley farmers in the summer of 1806. But recently that murderous tale was brought back to mind when I chanced upon the above picture of a half-timbered 'pigeon house'. This building had long since vanished by the time...
moreEndeavour: a new book
2nd May 2018
I have been quiet on here for some time but I have not been idle. I am just putting the finishing touches to a new book, Endeavour: the Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World. It is going to be published by Chatto in the UK on 23 August and in the US shortly after at a date soon TBC. In Endeavour I have tried to do two...
moreHistorical Miscellany #41 – A Sea Monster discovered in Porthleven, Cornwall (1786)
20th Jun 2016
(As reported in the Hereford Journal, Thursday 12 October 1786 - Illustration from The Monsters of the Deep, 1875) A description of Sea Monster found in Cornwall The following comes authenticated from a Gentleman of Morillian in Cornwall. A JUST and particular description of a very curious and most surprising sea monster...
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