1809 Ben Brown On the Beach

by William Bertram

Overview

This is the next book in the series after Ben Brown and the Right of Passage. In this book, we find our hero returning wounded from the battle of Barque Roads, arriving home on the Hospital Ship, along with the other severely wounded men. He is attended by three of his men, who volunteered to bring him home. Although, suffering from a ghastly head wound and hard of hearing now, he makes a remarkable recovery when he arrives home amongst his family.
Unfortunately, most of his family do not want him to go back to sea again, however, he has other ideas. The crisis comes when his ship arrives back in port and he finds it has to be decommissioned along with the officers going on half pay and the men going into receiving ships including his three servants. Using his family connections, he secures a position on an armed cutter.
This is the tale of a cheeky young man growing into maturity, as this book progresses he is given more and more chances to take command and to prove his worth. He is mentored by his old Captain and sustained during this adventure by his men. Later in the book he is involved in a desperate fight that will make him assume the mantle of leadership.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045947183
Publisher:	William Bertram
Publication date:	05/14/2014
Series:	Ben Brown's Adventures , #2
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	405 KB

About the Author

Bill Bertram has for the last forty years researched Britain’s late 18th and early 19th century Merchant and Royal Navy ships. At University, he specialised in the design and performance of wooden warships. He is now a maritime historian and writer living near Devonport Royal Naval Base, England. Bill’s work has been coloured by his historical knowledge and experience of seamanship, he has an unique approach to maritime history and has developed a dramatic style of writing that explores the brass tacks of historic maritime fiction. For him a good story must explain what is going on around the subject, it is extremely important that the background of the story is factually correct. Bill attended Plymouth University for his degree in Maritime History and Marine Technology. His dissertation on the sailing qualities of 19th century warships was rapidly accepted and broadcast on Television and Radio as well as being published in the New Scientist and in journals all around the world. During his time at University, he satisfied his academic curiosity and his need to eat, by becoming a guide at Plymouth Naval Base Museum and a receptionist at Fort Bovisand. For several years, he pursued this speciality further. The next years were fulfilling as a teacher, but retirement threatened and so Bill returned to his major academic love, maritime history, luckily he was in a city steeped in the past glories of her relationship with the sea. Now free from a profession, Bill again returned to his first love, the sea and writing historic novels. As a teenager, Bill loved the Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester and had always dreamed of writing books in that genre. It was at this point in Bill’s history that he decided to write books based on the history of Plymouth and its seafaring people. Resolving to write a mixture of factual and fiction books, his first three books progressed through several generations of the same family, he centred his rags to riches stories around the Brown family. Using factual evidence, he interwove the characters around Plymouth’s 18th century history and streets. This clearly involved many long days of research and fact-finding, however, eventually he wrote his first novel and swiftly followed it with two more in rapid succession. The first three books that Bill wrote are indeed based on an 18th century Plymouthian family who are clearly fictional, however, this can never be said of his novel’s backgrounds, here Bill has meticulously used old maps, drawings and records to build up an historic environment for his characters to exist in. Similarly with the three plays that have been also been composed, these also revolve about the same family, but are set in different centuries, but all involve the Plymouth Brown family and all deal with a period of historical significance. Bill Bertram has since published six books, He lives and writes from his home in Plymouth, for relaxation, Bill visits the sea daily and he is currently the owner of an Edwardian Steamboat in which he potters about.