The story behind the story
Women on board
Transgenders serving on ships is nothing new. I’ve long been interested in women on ships in the Age of Sail -- particularly women posing as men, passing as men, doing [...]
No trick-or-treat –it’s the night of the hungry ghosts
October 19, 2016: Here in the U.S. we're in full Halloween mode with last year's zombie get-ups and this year's creepy clown scare. In the American Southwest, Dia de Muertos [...]
The Notorious Captain Hayes; a conversation with author Joan Druett
The American-born seafarer William "Bully" Hayes was a notorious celebrity in his own lifetime and in the century after his death became the antihero of numerous accounts, novels, secondhand memoirs [...]
Teenaged eunuchs
Water Ghosts took a long time to write, mostly because I got side-tracked with historical research, including Chinese maritime navigational techniques, Asian gods, goddesses, and ghosts -- and court eunuchs [...]
Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird influenced me greatly as a young reader. While Atticus was the hero of that book, I identified with young Scout, a tomboy (as I [...]
History lives aboard the North Star of Herschel Island
What would it be like to live aboard a historic arctic sailing ship? Freelance writer Bruce MacDonald wrote the book about the life and times of North Star of Herschel [...]
Roy and Lesley Adkins on Jane Austen’s World
This is the summer for Jane Austen festivals; this, the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. I'd love to attend one of these celebratory functions where I imagine [...]
A brief history of hospital ships, part 2
I became interested in the history of hospital ships and shipboard medicine while researching my historical novels, Barbados Bound and Surgeon’s Mate, that take place during Britain’s rise to naval power [...]
A brief history of hospital ships; part I
According to historian and author J. David Davies, the concept of a hospital ship was well established in 17th century Britain. During the Anglo-Dutch wars most casualties were taken ashore [...]
HMS Acasta meets Andromeda — in 1812
What happens when a character in your novel gets entangled with a character in someone else's novel -- or with a group of living history interpretors? I've been following the [...]