Tracing Ships
When I began exploring Jack Coffey’s world, I knew I was heading deep into the world of 18th-century shipping. And what a world it is — the breadth of documentary evidence around Britain’s naval presence in this era is truly staggering.
The first book I bought, and still one of the most valuable for grounding myself in the period, was Ships of the Royal Navy. At over 500 pages, it’s intimidating in size — but once you realise every page lists 20–30 ships with solid details, you begin to understand just how massive the Royal Navy was and how central it was to Britain’s ambitions.
I write by following the story — I create a protagonist, make him as plausible and grounded as I can, and then imagine an event. For Jack, that event was stowing away on a ship in Bridgetown harbour to escape enslavement.
I didn’t just need a ship — I needed one that was plausibly in the right place at the right time. I needed something small and, for my purposes, insignificant — so I could build the narrative around Jack’s personality without being swamped by hundreds of sailors and a complex chain of command.
That’s how I found the HMS Happy. Thanks to the wonderful details available on the threedecks.org database — a crowdsourced but highly detailed naval resource — I discovered she was surveying in the Caribbean at exactly the right moment. She then returned to Britain, arriving in 1735, perfectly positioned to move Jack’s story forward.
Once I started following the actual movements of Happy, I discovered she was sailing in company with HMS Aldborough. That led me down a rabbit hole, because Aldborough isn’t just a name in a book — in the 1730s she served in the West Indies and along the American coast, and at one point she carried James Oglethorpe and a delegation of Yamacraw Indians back to Britain.
I’ll confess — I knew nothing about Oglethorpe before this. But he turned out to be an extraordinary historical figure: a British army officer, the principal founder of the colony of Georgia, and a man deeply involved with Native American diplomacy and early abolitionist thought.
Following Oglethorpe led me to Tomochichi and the Yamacraw, and on into the wider world of abolitionist history, including figures like Granville Sharp — one of the earliest campaigners against the slave trade in Britain.
All of this sprang from the simple act of picking a ship with a fun name and asking: Where would she be? Who was on her? What would she do next?
In Jack’s world, that small decision flipped everything open — and gave me a narrative landscape richer and more intriguing than I ever expected.
And as for source documents. I'm lucky to have access to the Caird library at the National Maritime Museum for the Lieutenant's Logs (see below) and the Captain's Logs at the National Archive at Kew.
