My Guest Today is Danelle Harmon, Author of Wonderful High Seas Romances

Since I’m writing the third in the Agents of the Crown trilogy, which takes place on a schooner in 1817, I have been deep into research of all things nautical of the Regency period, and was fascinated to learn of other authors who also take pains to get all the ship terminology right. I have a new respect for the hard work this means for the author. 

My guest today, Danelle Harmon (pictured at right), is one of those authors who works hard to "get it right." She is the award-winning author of eleven historical romances, including the The Wild One, and many other national and international bestsellers. Her books are set in her native New England as well as England (where she once lived). Today she is helping us understand what goes into writing a shipboard historical romance and what stirred her passion to write them.

And, for one lucky commenter, Danelle is very generously giving away the full eBook set of her Heroes of the Sea series, including Master Of My Dreams, Captain Of My Heart, My Lady Pirate, and her new short story, The Admiral's Heart!

Thank you so much, Regan, for inviting me to be one of your guest bloggers; it is an honor and a privilege to be here!

It was during my lunch break on a long-ago day back in the mid 80s, that I first saw her. 

And fell in love.

Her name was Pride of Baltimore, and she was known as a “tall ship,” though as tall ships go, she wasn’t all that “tall” … the size, really, of a large yacht as opposed to something like the US Coast Guard’s mighty Eagle. But she was tall enough that her two masts rose high, high, high above the tops of the leafy trees that bordered the riverside parking lot there in our little maritime city of Newburyport, Massachusetts, her lofty pennants fluttering in the wind, her very presence capturing the imagination of all who saw her. And I dreamed about ships like her, and life aboard them, in another, faraway, time and place.  She was a topsail schooner with sharply raked masts, a long, jaunty bowsprit, sleek black sides that reflected the Merrimack’s rippling current, and the look of a racehorse about her —a replica “Baltimore clipper,” docked in Newburyport as part of her goodwill tour, and I never forgot her.

By mid-1986, she was gone forever, knocked over by sudden hurricane-force Caribbean winds and sinking within minutes, taking her captain and three of her crew with her.

At the time, I had no real aspirations about writing romance novels, or incorporating Pride as one of my characters. But it’s funny, the paths our destinies take, and the way our lives meander and twist such that we revisit, often again and again, those events from our past. Some years later, Pride appeared in a calendar that used to hang above the desk in my little office cubicle … she appeared again in my memory whenever I’d walk the historic Newburyport boardwalk and remember her, moored there so long ago … and she appeared again in my eventual career as a romance writer, in my book, Captain Of My Heart. 

There, she was the model and inspiration for the magnificent topsail schooner, Kestrel, designed and commanded by the dashing, wily, insanely brave Irish privateer captain Brendan Jay Merrick. Set in Newburyport during the early years of the American Revolution and culminating in the Penobscot (Maine) Expedition — our country’s greatest naval disaster until Pearl Harbor two centuries later — Captain Of My Heart is the tale of a clever privateer captain, a feisty shipbuilder’s daughter who knows no boundaries, and a very, very special ship. Though Pride of Baltimore may lie forever in a grave even deeper than that of Titanic’s, I hope, in some small way, that she lives again in the schooner Kestrel — my own little tribute to her — which also appears in My Lady Pirate and Wicked At Heart, and will appear in more before my work is done. She is as much a character as any of the people or animals in my books, and I have become quite fond of her.

What is at the heart of our fascination with the sea, ships, and those who risk life and limb to command and sail them? It’s been said that ships are the only man-made creation that have both spine and ribs, and certainly, it’s easy to think of them as living, breathing entities. By their very nature, and the setting in which we find them, they lend themselves to flights of romantic fancy. Ships, pirates, privateers, mariners … they are familiar to readers of historical romance, though less so than they were in the earlier days of our genre. But in these older books, and in their reissues, we often encounter these ships, sometimes convincingly, sometimes … as mere window dressing.

Though a romance novel doesn’t have to be as technically advanced as a Patrick O’ Brien book when it comes to ship terminology and workings (and indeed, if it were, it would probably lose a lot of readers — after all, we read romance for the love story, not to be treated to a lengthy dissertation on ship anatomy and physiology), there is no excuse for shoddy research when it comes to getting the terms right. Just as there were different types of ships — sloops, snows, schooners, pinks, brigs, brigantines, galleys, frigates, cutters, ships-of-the-line, 74s, and so on — there are specific names for each mast, each sail, each deck, and so on. It’s not that hard to get them right. When I come across a “floor” or, God forbid, a “ceiling,” on a wooden sailing ship in a romance novel, or see a ship addressed as “The” Shipname, it really throws me out of the story in a pretty hard and fast way. There are no “floors” and “ceilings” or even “walls” on a wooden sailing ship, and no seaman in his right mind would call his ship “The” Kestrel.  I’ve marked up many a copyeditor’s “corrections” putting things back the way they should be.

A native New Englander descended from Mayflower and Revolutionary War ancestors, I was born and raised not far from the sea, and I guess it’s in my blood as much as it is anyone’s who is a native here. Though only four of my eleven published books are sea stories, they have been amongst the most fun to write … and even more fun to research. I have spent weekends aboard Maine windjammers (the schooners American Eagle and Mary Day), done day sails on the schooner Spirit of Massachusetts, and taken a summer of sailing lessons, where I was (much to my trepidation) deemed competent enough to take out a 17’ sloop, alone, whenever the urge struck. 

I also spent some years working as a volunteer research associate for Barry Clifford, who discovered, and continues to salvage, the pirate ship Whydah, and in this capacity I spent many an hour holed up in quiet rooms of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, researching specific shipwrecks in which Barry had an interest; occasionally, I’d drive out to his conservation lab on Cape Cod, two hours away, and spend the day there helping to draw and catalog artifacts such as a pirate’s pistol, musketballs, eating utensils, pieces of eight, a sword hilt, bits of bone and leather, and other lost-in-time items from the ship when it went down in a storm in 1717. 

I even got to go aboard the salvage ship, Maritime Explorer, where I watched divers bringing aboard Whydah’s pieces of eight and other long-lost treasures that had lain on the sea floor for nearly three centuries. The story of the fabled Whydah so moved me that I wrote a book around its darkly handsome captain, “Black” Sam Bellamy, and Mariah Hallet, his young Cape Cod lover; legend has it that the pirate captain was on his way to reclaim her, his ship full of treasure, when Whydah struck a sand bar off present day Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in a raging nor’easter one night and went down with a huge loss of life — right on the very doorstep, so to speak, of the beautiful Maria, herself.  I gave the tale a happier ending and it eventually became my first published novel, Pirate In My Arms.

And then there’s Master Of My Dreams, the story of a steady, disciplined, and by-the-book Royal Navy captain of 1775 whose life, after a tragic past, is turned upside down by a crew of malcontents and an Irish stowaway who’s determined to kill him. Much of it takes place aboard a frigate — a three masted warship which is larger than, and quite different from, a schooner like Kestrel.

Finally, there’s My Lady Pirate, a sequel to Captain Of My Heart, and in it, I did my best to honor British Admiral Lord Nelson, a man for whom I have intense admiration and of whom I was, and remain, very fond. In researching this book, I visited pretty much every important (as well as forgotten) Nelson site in England and was given a private tour of HMS Victory by a friend of mine who was, at the time, a tour guide on that great ship; he brought me to places in Victory where the general public is not allowed — places that included the deepest recesses of the ship itself, where her mighty keel stretches forever into the gloom, her great ribs curving up into the heights above. I will always treasure those experiences, and hope they have enhanced my writing.

In the years since that summer day in Newburyport when I first saw Pride of Baltimore tied up at the boardwalk there, many ships have come and gone, including, most recently, the late, great, HMS Bounty — also lost to a force of nature greater than herself. All have been beautiful in their own way, but none had quite the same impact on me as Pride did.  Someday, I hope to take sailing lessons again, and perhaps purchase a small sailboat, which I will name, of course, Kestrel.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to walk the historic boardwalk in Newburyport where once, a long time ago, I saw a beautiful ship rising tall above our city … a beautiful ship that set off a life-long love for me and inspired a bestseller.

Danelle welcomes mail from her readers (Danelle@Danelleharmon.com) and can be found on Danelleharmon.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DanelleHarmon.