Maggie Chase discovers an injured stranger hiding between two rocks as he flees for his life on the beach. Rapidly, she is forced to make a choice: reveal his whereabouts to the fast approaching press gang, or hide him from their sight.
The Impress Service was set up to make sure that the Royal Navy had the needed number of sailors to man its ships. It was harsh and unfair as the press gangs were notorious for their raids, often ignoring the set age-limits of between 18-55, in an era when it was difficult to prove your age when plucked off the street.
The coastal towns were rife with smuggling. Robin Hood’s Bay, for example, had a network of tunnels and passages linking the houses built on its steep banks. Although these were designed to move and hide contraband, they also proved useful when the press gang arrived. The womenfolk fought off the gang with anything they had to hand whilst their menfolk hid. They were a tough and hardy people, which is why the service wanted good seafaring men at a time when paid volunteers were not enough in number to fight Napoleon’s threat. Criminals who had chosen to serve a different type of sentence in the Royal Navy were often weakened by illness because of their previous incarceration. Therefore, the press gang swooped on the unsuspecting and gained a ruthless reputation as a result.
The eBook of The Captain’s Creek is available from Smashwords and Amazon directly or from most eBook sellers.
My stories are often set around the dramatic coast and countryside of North Yorkshire, where I grew up. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty and fascinating social history, especially around the early nineteenth century when England was at war with France and many things were changing at home.
The Yorkshire cobles with their flat bottoms were ideal for beaching loads of contraband. Goods such as tea, cards, ankers of brandy, geneva, pepper, ‘sack’ or sherry, sugar loaves, silk and cards, to name a few were taxed heavily, which meant that common folk felt justified by buying them cheaply from the free-traders. The irony was that the coin, which made its way back to France, helped to fund the enemy that British soldiers were fighting.
The rugged headlands, flat sweeping fine sandy bays, natural woodland and the beautiful expanse of the North Yorkshire Moors inland add both a great variety of scenery and beauty. The settings for my stories are as dramatic as the plots. I have created my own villages and characters and will introduce you to some of them as I look more closely at the actual history of this fascinating region.
Buy and read now!
valerie holmes, author 