The notes for my story
A Voyage Out East
I actually find Robin Button surprisingly hard to write. My usual method is to over-explain things in the early drafts, then pare it back in later versions. Some of the previous stories had entire pages detailing how the war went on, the duties aboard ship, the effect of cannonfire and splinters on bodies and how the wounds were treated. I cut them back to make room for character and plot and to improve the pacing; this isn’t a history after all.
(I may append a bibliography at some stage though as I’ve been reading Age of Sail fiction and non-fiction for more than thirty years I’ve forgotten as much as I can remember).
Button, a common sailor for most purposes, doesn’t understand things deeply, and he doesn’t mind about that. It’s not that he didn’t care why and who they were fighting in the Navy, but that was much less important than the day to day duties aboard ship, the attitude of the officers and the skill and character of the captain.
Button doesn’t have adventures with beginnings middles and ends; he has events and episodes of interest. Originally I was just going to start him on a ship going somewhere, and finish with him on another ship, going somewhere else. When I sat down to write it Maisie May entered from the earlier stories, pushing him to get on the ship, and into the seas where we would find him later; Cat Step Walker jumped in from planned later stories, bringing the elves onto the page, setting him up to be found in their company by other characters.
So I know too much about what’s going on. And I do care. Why would I write it otherwise? Button just accepts what’s going on. Occasionally he questions, but since he doesn’t get answers he just takes it all in his stride.
Mutiny! Mutinies were rarer than fiction would have us believe. Sailors would take poor food, tyrannical captains, harsh punishment and even incompetence in their stride. More likely to wait until they got into port and desert than try and seize the ship.
Lesser mutinies did take place, though they might be better understood as protests or industrial action. Sailors refusing to set sail until their complaints were dealt with or promises kept. This isn’t what happens here. Here we have an organised plot to steal the ship. This happened occasionally; perhaps the most famous such event was the mutiny on the Dutch East Indies ship
Batavia. This went extremely wrong, with the ship running aground on the Houtman Abrolhos off Western Australia. There was an orgy of murder, rape and plunder, sensationalised at the time as the ringleaders were followers of the famous heretical painter Torrentus, who were fleeing Europe after his conviction. In other words it was blamed on devil worshippers.
My anthrophagic version of mer-maids are not especially original, for which I can only apologise. Fortunately both Tim and Button, protected by the mysterious power they encountered on the Triumph are resistant to their charms.
I have thoughts on immortality and elves. But they could be the focus of a whole story, or series, or novel, or whatever, so once again I’ve flensed it to the bone. The injured elf, unable to get away, unable to die; the dark side of immortality is something I’ve thought about. But I’m not going quite that grim in this series!
Also grim and really deserving its own story is slavery. I’ve glossed it a bit in earlier tales. Here Cat Step Walker, an instinctive abolitionist (he’s immortal, debts and servitude shouldn’t last forever), demonstrates that stopping violence is not a clean and easy process. The world is better without the slavers in it, but that doesn’t stop things being bloody and cruel either.
Being cast adrift and ending up on a tropical shore was something I had on my list from before this even began to crystallise as a project. It naturally linked up with the lost city idea. The Jungle Coast is perhaps a little too specifically named, though everywhere else on the map are translations of the names of real places in East Africa and they’re a bit on the nose too.
The Jungle Coast is more the fictional (European) idea of Africa, and that’s unfortunately accentuated by Button’s lack of knowledge and incurious nature. Of course there are white sand beaches, mangrove swamps, ruined cities and pirates. The deep history with a necromancer king is a little off the beaten track, but not entirely.
As for the
Starling and its crew of mutineers and pirates, we’ll see them again in a later story.
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