JACK'S BACK! JACK STONE WILL RETURN IN MY LATEST NOVEL 'DIAMOND ROCK'

Cover of 'Diamond Rock'

When I wrote my first book, ‘Weymouth Bound’ many years ago, I imagined the main character, Jack Stone, as someone like Robert Louis Stevenson’s young protagonists, Jim Hawkins of ‘Treasure Island’, or David Balfour from ‘Kidnapped’.  Jack was a young man, son of a smuggler, thrilled to be taken on as apprentice to the master of a sailing coaster.  In ‘Weymouth Bound’, Jack develops, finding not only the resilience required to survive as a fugitive, but the ingenuity and determination necessary to fight an enemy vastly stronger than himself.

The Great Beach, Carteret from the Cap. Inspiration for 'Weymouth Bound' with Paul Weston's sister Elizabeth during a family holiday

He may be good at war, but his distaste for it becomes apparent – watching a French family through the window of their cottage, so similar to his own, he wonders why they are his enemy, and he feels guilt when he steals their boat.  In my second book, ‘Not by Sea’ he joins the Navy as a midshipman, a great opportunity for one with Jack’s background,  but after capture and a spell in the notorious Temple prison in Paris he resigns, disgusted both by war and by the tyranny of the French state. 

Launching a traditional 'Lerret' from the beach at Portland

He watches as Lord Cochrane’s Pallas, the ‘Golden’ Pallas, miles from the sea in the Gironde, attacks a French fort.  Though he feels admiration and pride for such an audacious act by the British Navy, he has no wish to be part of it. Perhaps these are  ‘luxury’ views – Jack is protected both by his heroic status and by his marriage to the daughter of a prominent revolutionary family, but his hardships have been real and survival uncertain.

Recruitment poster for Cochrane's 'Pallas'. Such posters were presumably unnecessary following the ship's triumphant return, laden with gold and displaying five foot high golden Spanish candelabras at her mastheads.

There may be another motivation for leaving the Navy.  He is the son of a fisherman, apprentice in a merchant ship, then a naval midshipman - a seaman.  It is almost inconceivable that he could be, or wish to be, anything else, but he does, he wants to be an engineer.  In Portsmouth he worked with Robert Fulton, the American inventor, and he’s been corrupted, seduced by engineering.  It’s the start of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution is really starting to flower, and the opportunities for engineers are almost infinite.

The Enlightenment, and its direct descendant, the Industrial Revolution are epitomised by the Royal Navy, and Jack has been exposed to the highly mathematical concepts of navigation, the attempts to control disease through nutrition and the almost obsessive attention to cleanliness, and the vast scale of industry at Portsmouth Dockyard.

Seafaring and engineering have one thing in common – solving problems.  In seafaring these include overcoming the vagaries of wind and weather, navigation and the deficiencies of the ship and her gear.  In engineering they are essentially infinite – especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when precedents were rather thin on the ground, and there were no standards to work to. Jack, essentially, has got the bug, the problem solving, engineering bug.  Seafaring is all very well, interesting, but somehow limited compared to engineering.  That’s how I feel anyway, and I think that Jack has the same view.

In my third and fourth books, 'Cape Corse' and 'Gulf of Lions', Jack is supplanted as the main protagonist by Percy Snowden. They are midshipmen together, but Snowden, untroubled by the concept of pacifism, embraces his naval career, and, in 'Cape Corse' and 'Gulf of Lions' shows a remarkable aptitude for irregular warfare. My latest novel 'Diamond Rock', soon to be released, is essentially a work of naval fiction, and Snowden, in the West Indies, continues his depredations against the French, but Jack Stone is re-introduced.

Through his wife’s family connections, Jack Stone has secured a job with Monsieur E I du Pont, an émigré chemist who has started what will become one of the world's foremost chemical businesses, on Brandywine Creek in Maryland, tasked with assisting in the building of a Watts pattern steam engine.  This is a tremendous intellectual challenge, especially away from the powerhouse of innovation that was the Soho Foundry of Boulton and Watt.  The American Revolution is not long over, and as an export license for a Watts engine is unobtainable, they have decided to make their own. 

It is hard to imagine anything more likely to inspire a young man – a fantastically interesting engineering project, with problems to be overcome at every turn, working for an enlightened employer in a vast new country with a wife and home.  The seaman is undoubtedly still somewhere inside him, but for the moment the challenges and opportunities of engineering have captured him.

Jack’s back!  No longer a lad, a Portland smuggler, but an American engineer at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, with the world at his feet.