Seymour Travels, Bath (2025)

With 12 years working as a guide for Rick Steves, and my own company Seymour Travels, its a privelage to work with you. With 10 years working as a guide for Rick Steves Europe, I discovered there was a need for very small group travel.

09/08/2025

Percival Fitzroy was a man of leisure in the truest, most impractical sense of the phrase. He had never been gainfully employed, unless you counted his three-month stint as a wine merchant’s apprentice in Chelsea, which ended when he drank a week’s profit in a single sitting, and his days were spent in a comfortable haze of reading newspapers, corresponding with distant cousins, and considering whether the wearing of a cravat in the morning constituted an artistic statement or mere affectation.
At fifty-eight, Percival had grown weary of London’s December: too damp, too loud, and too full of people with somewhere to be. This year, he resolved to do something daring, perhaps even scandalous … he would leave the capital entirely and spend Christmas somewhere rural, remote, and, ideally, within easy reach of good port.
The Swinton Park Country House Hotel in the Yorkshire Dales presented itself as the perfect choice. A sprawling 17th-century building with mullioned windows, a history involving at least one minor scandal in the Victorian era, and a wine cellar rumoured to rival that of the Ritz. Even better, it offered “A Traditional Yorkshire Christmas Experience,” which promised roaring fires, brass bands, hearty fare, and, a phrase that caught Percival’s particular interest, “an abundance of puddings.”

On the 23rd of December, Percival arrived at Swinton Park swaddled in tweed and optimism. The train from King’s Cross had deposited him in Thirsk, where a cheerful young porter in a flat cap had bundled his leather trunks into the back of a Range Rover and driven him through a landscape dusted with snow. Dry stone walls lined the roads like icing on a Christmas cake, and in the distance, the Dales rose in folds of white and grey.
The hotel itself appeared at the end of a long drive, glowing in the dusk like something from a particularly sentimental Victorian Christmas card. Smoke curled from the chimneys; fairy lights twinkled in the bare branches of an ancient beech; the main entrance was framed by a garland of holly, ivy, and an ambitious number of red baubles.
He was greeted in the oak-panelled entrance hall by Mrs. Beasley, the manageress, a brisk woman in her late fifties with the air of someone who could run both a small hotel and a large military operation without breaking stride.
“Mr Fitzroy,” she said warmly. “Welcome to Swinton Park. We do hope you enjoy our Christmas programme.”
“I have every expectation of doing so,” said Percival, handing over his gloves with the air of a man relinquishing diplomatic credentials.
Swinton Park was fully booked for the holiday, and the guest list read like the social register of a novel in which not much happens but everyone enjoys themselves immensely.
There was Major Bletchley (Retired), a small man with a large moustache who claimed to have single-handedly defended Gibraltar from an “unpleasantness” in the late 1970s. The Dabthorpes, a married couple from Harrogate, were both enthusiastic about local history and uninterested in talking about anything else. Miss Cora Peverell, in her seventies and inclined to wear elaborate hats indoors, brought with her a Pekingese named Horace who looked like an exceptionally irritated footstool.
Then there was Mr. Stanley Snipe, a man of indeterminate age who wrote letters to The Times about subjects ranging from decimalisation to the decline of marmalade, and who treated every conversation as an opportunity to deliver an editorial.
The staff were equally memorable. Besides Mrs. Beasley, there was Eddie, the young barman who could mix a martini while telling a joke in dialect incomprehensible to anyone south of Sheffield; Agnes, the head housekeeper, who claimed the hotel’s west wing was haunted by “a monk with cold feet”; and Chef Gibbons, a genius in the kitchen whose Yorkshire puddings were said to have made a visiting duchess weep.

On Percival’s first evening, the drawing room was a picture of seasonal contentment. A log fire the size of a small car roared in the grate; the scent of mulled wine and cinnamon hung in the air; and a brass quartet from Masham stood in the corner playing carols with the resolute cheer of men unbothered by the fact that their instruments were steaming slightly from the cold.
It was during “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” that Percival first noticed the Carol Singers. They were a troupe of local villagers who appeared each evening to sing in the entrance hall, dressed in cloaks and mufflers, some of which looked as though they’d been in the family since before the Industrial Revolution. Their leader, Mr. Hargreaves, sang with the booming bass of a man who had spent his life shouting at sheep.
After their performance, Mrs. Beasley distributed mince pies and hot punch, and the guests mingled like members of a well-fed expedition party awaiting favourable weather. Percival found himself in conversation with Miss Peverell, who confided that Horace had once bitten a visiting bishop “but only because the man was wearing galoshes.”

The morning of the 24th dawned bright and bitterly cold. Percival took breakfast in the conservatory … kippers, toast, and an excellent pot of Yorkshire tea … while admiring the frost on the lawns.
At eleven, a walking party set out to the nearby village for the Christmas Eve market. Percival, not wishing to risk frostbite, opted to remain in the hotel lounge with a book and a glass of sherry. It was here that he was joined by Major Bletchley, who delivered a forty-minute monologue on the strategic importance of mince pies in winter campaigns.
By mid-afternoon, the walkers returned red-cheeked and laden with packages. Agnes appeared with the alarming announcement that “t’brass quartet’s lost a trombone,” which turned out to mean that the player had left it in the pub after “just the one pint.”
That evening’s dinner was a triumph: roast goose, bread sauce, red cabbage, and plum pudding with brandy sauce. Percival sat between Mrs. Dabthorpe, who explained the entire architectural history of Bolton Abbey, and Mr. Snipe, who was incensed by “modern tamperings” with the recipe for Christmas cake.

At eight o’clock, the carol singers returned for a candlelit performance in the great hall. Snow had begun to fall outside, and the effect was magical. They began with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” moved through “The Holly and the Ivy,” and concluded with a l***y rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in which the demand for figgy pudding sounded almost like a threat.
Afterwards, everyone gathered for hot chocolate and stories by the fire. Agnes told the one about the ghostly monk again, with additional details about his supposed fondness for gingerbread. Eddie passed around a tray of “just-a-splash” nightcaps that proved to contain more whisky than milk.
Percival went to bed that night feeling that the world was, for once, exactly as it should be.

He awoke to the sound of church bells drifting across the snow-covered grounds. Downstairs, the drawing room was already humming with the scent of pine and the low murmur of happy conversation.
Breakfast was a lavish affair: smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, croissants, and something called “fat rascals” which Percival learned were a type of fruit scone native to Yorkshire and not, as he had briefly feared, an unkind nickname for the Major and Mr. Snipe.
At eleven, the guests who wished to attend the Christmas service were driven to the village church in a convoy of Land Rovers, while those remaining were treated to a sleigh ride around the estate, pulled by two enormous Shire horses named Samson and Delilah. Percival, fearing frostbite and preferring indoor comforts, elected to remain in the library with a second glass of sherry.
The main event, of course, was Christmas lunch. Chef Gibbons outdid himself: roast turkey, goose, roast beef, stuffing, Yorkshire puddings, Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, roast potatoes the size of billiard balls, and three separate gravies. The pudding was flambéed with sufficient brandy to light half of North Yorkshire.
Major Bletchley made a short speech praising “the indefatigable spirit of the British Christmas dinner,” which was interrupted only once by Horace barking at the sight of the flaming pudding.
In the afternoon, guests drifted into various pursuits: some played charades, others dozed by the fire. Mr. Snipe attempted to organise a debate on whether Boxing Day sales represented “a moral decline,” but was gently dissuaded by Mrs. Beasley, who suggested he try the cheese board instead.

After a light supper (which, in Yorkshire, still meant three courses), the great hall was cleared for dancing. A local ceilidh band struck up jigs and reels, and even Miss Peverell was persuaded into a lively polka, hat and all. Percival attempted a waltz, but found his partner, Mrs. Dabthorpe, to be both more enthusiastic and less spatially aware than expected, resulting in several near-misses with the Christmas tree.
At midnight, the remaining revellers gathered for one final carol. Snow still fell outside, and the air in the hall was warm with candlelight and the comfortable camaraderie of strangers brought together by food, song, and shared absurdities.

Boxing Day was devoted to fresh air and gentle recovery. Some guests went for a bracing walk to the waterfalls; others stayed indoors for board games and the strategic consumption of leftovers. Percival, never one to overexert himself, split his time between the library and the bar, occasionally nodding at people who returned from the cold with faces like frozen beetroot.
That evening, as he sat by the fire with a final glass of port, Mrs. Beasley approached.
“We do hope you’ve enjoyed your stay, Mr. Fitzroy,” she said.
“My dear Mrs. Beasley,” said Percival, “I have been wined, dined, serenaded, and occasionally startled by a Pekingese. I can think of no better way to spend Christmas.”
And with that, he raised his glass to the Dales, the hotel, and to the peculiar, wonderful magic of an English country house Christmas, where the snow always seems to fall at the right moment, the pudding is always ablaze, and the carol singers always get their figgy pudding in the end.

( This morning as I hugged a double espresso, I started thinking about next years Christmas staycation that will take place in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales…. Some of the characters are based on people that I have met on previous occasions and I wanted to bring them to life. I’m looking forward to next year 😁)

08/08/2025

Now, I don’t want to brag, but there’s a certain kind of man who can walk out into a field full of rain-soaked, bad-tempered sheep, covered in mud up to his knees, and still hold his head high. That man is usually me. My name’s Emyr Hughes, and I’ve been a sheep farmer here in Cwm Bychan, in the shadow of Snowdon, since the day I was old enough to hold a crook and shout “C’mon, you lot!” without my voice squeaking like a rusty gate.
If you’ve never been here, you should know that Cwm Bychan is the sort of place where the clouds get stuck on the mountains and forget to leave, where the wind has a personal vendetta against hats, and where sheep outnumber people by such a margin that they sometimes win local elections.

The day begins, as all days here do, with the weather trying to kill me. The wind howls through the rafters of my stone cottage like an opera singer with a toothache. I roll out of bed, step straight onto the cold slate floor, and curse softly in Welsh. My wife, Mair, is already up, boiling oats in the pot and muttering about the price of tea.
“Emyr,” she says, handing me a mug the colour of ditch water, “don’t forget the lower field’s gate blew open last night.”
Now, for those who have never farmed sheep, a blown-open gate is a bigger problem than a collapsed chimney or an unexpected visit from the tax man. A blown-open gate means your flock might have gone exploring. And in Snowdonia, that could mean anywhere … the lower slopes of Yr Wyddfa, the village high street, or, in the case of Dai the Ram, into Old Mrs. Pritchard’s back garden, where he once ate all her washing and was sick in her coal scuttle.
So, I pull on my boots, still wet from yesterday, though I hung them by the fire, and set out into the drizzle. It’s the kind of drizzle that doesn’t look like much but can soak a man to his bones in five minutes flat. The mountains are wearing their usual shawl of mist, and the sheep are just dim shapes dotted across the hillside like lumps of old, damp wool someone’s thrown away.

Farming sheep, you quickly realise they’re not all the same. Each has their own personality, though “personality” is perhaps too generous a term for what is usually just a different flavour of stupidity.
There’s Dai the Ram, a creature of monumental stubbornness, with horns like twisted roots and the ability to open gates by ramming them until the latch gives way. He’s the unofficial leader, though “leader” in a sheep sense means “the one who runs first when spooked by something imaginary.”
Then there’s Blodwen, who thinks she’s a dog. No idea why. She follows me everywhere, even into the privy once, which was unsettling for us both.
And there’s Ifan, the escape artist. I’ve seen him clear a stone wall higher than my shoulders. Last spring he vanished for a week and turned up in the churchyard, eating the vicar’s flowers. The vicar said it was a sign from God. I told him it was a sign I needed to build higher walls.
I find them all eventually, though they’ve spread themselves across two fields and part of the road to Beddgelert. Rounding up sheep in Snowdonia is an art form, part persuasion, part bribery, and part running after them while shouting words I’d rather Mair didn’t hear.
My dog, Taff, is a genius compared to the sheep. He can round up thirty in five minutes, while it takes me an hour to convince three stragglers to come down off a slope that looks like it’s one sneeze away from becoming a landslide.
By the time I’ve got them all back and the gate fixed with a length of rope (because the hinge has gone and the blacksmith’s charging more than my soul is worth), I’m soaked, covered in mud, and smell like I’ve been sleeping in a wool sack.

Today’s one of those rare days in summer when the rain stops long enough for shearing. Shearing is a delicate balance between speed and safety … safety for the sheep, mostly, because they tend to panic the moment you pick up the shears.
Dai the Ram is first, because if I leave him till last, he’ll escape and I’ll be chasing him across three valleys by teatime. He comes in snorting like an angry bull, and the moment I start, he wriggles like a fish on a hook. I’m wrestling him on the shearing stool when Dai lets out a sneeze … full force …right in my face. Sheep sneezes are… aromatic !!!!.
The rest of them follow in various stages of indignation. Blodwen tries to sit on my lap like a pet spaniel. Ifan manages to kick over the bucket of wool, scattering it across the yard so it looks like a snowstorm in July.
By the time the last fleece is bagged, I’ve got wool in my hair, down my shirt, and somehow in my socks. Mair says she once found some in the stew I made. That was two weeks after shearing.

Living in Snowdonia, you get your fair share of visitors … hikers, artists, and, worst of all, city folk who think sheep are just “fluffy countryside dogs.” Today it’s two gentlemen from London, wearing coats finer than anything I’ll ever own. They’ve come “to see a real working farm.”
Within ten minutes, one of them has stepped in something he shouldn’t have and the other has been chased halfway up the lane by Dai, who dislikes top hats on principle. They leave looking slightly traumatised, muttering about “rustic authenticity.”

Just as I’m thinking about supper, Taff starts barking at the ridge above the house. Sure enough, there’s Ifan, halfway up, eyeing the grass on the other side like it’s the promised land.
I scramble up after him, slipping on wet rock and cursing my life choices. When I reach him, he stares at me with those blank, unbothered eyes sheep have, as if to say, “What’s the problem?” I grab him by the scruff (gently, I’m not a monster) and guide him back down, only for him to immediately make another run for it. Sheep farming is mostly this: repeating the same task forever in the hope that one day the sheep might learn. They never do.

After supper, I walk down to the village inn, The Golden Ram, for a pint and some conversation that isn’t about turnip prices. The regulars are there … Dafydd the blacksmith, who claims he once shoed a horse that kicked so hard it knocked his hat clean off from ten paces; Siôn the postman, who delivers letters to places no road reaches; and old Guto, who insists he once saw a sheep riding a cart down to Caernarfon.
We swap stories until the fire burns low. The talk always comes back to sheep, because here, sheep are life, wool, meat, and trouble in equal measure.
When I stumble home under the star-spattered sky, Taff padding beside me, I know tomorrow will be the same: chasing strays, mending gates, rescuing visitors from Dai, and pulling wool out of places I didn’t know it could reach.
It’s a life of wet boots, stubborn animals, and weather that could turn a saint into a swearing man. But it’s mine. And when the mist lifts from the mountains in the early light, and the valley glows green as emerald, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

( I lead small groups into the mountains of North Wales… often. I have friends who are sheep farmers… and wonderful people !. I hope you have enjoyed this tale. If so, please share it and ‘like’ it. Thank you )

07/08/2025

John Constable stood ankle-deep in a patch of Suffolk mud, peering across a somewhat uninspiring stretch of meadow, next to Flatford Mill. To his left, a rickety wooden cart, partially submerged in the river, groaned in protest as a horse nearby chewed grass with the enthusiasm of someone who had long since given up caring. Behind him, his friend and long-suffering companion, William Lott, clutched a heavy sketchbook and a half-eaten pork pie, both of which had been dampened by the drizzle that had plagued them all morning.
Constable narrowed his eyes and turned slowly on the spot, arms folded, jaw clenched in artistic agony.
“William,” he muttered.
“Mmm?”
“Where’s the drama?”
William blinked. “Well, I’d say most of it’s in your trousers at the moment. That mud is up to your knee.”
“I don’t mean that sort of drama,” Constable huffed. “I mean the drama of nature. Sublime. Moving. Storms! Clouds! Passion!”
William looked up at the soft, lazy clouds drifting above Dedham Vale like a drunk cat across a windowsill.
“Looks rather pleasant to me,” he offered. “Tranquil, you might say.”
Constable sighed. “Yes, and that’s the problem. My last three canvases have been described as ‘delightfully sleepy.’ Sleepy! I don’t want sleepy, William. I want movement. Meaning. Soul. Something people will hang in the National Gallery, if ever such a place existed.”
William, who was quite content with ‘sleepy’, sat down on a damp tree stump and unwrapped a second pork pie… a delicious pork pie !

Constable had long suffered from a peculiar affliction: Arboraphobia Contradictum, known in art circles as “Painter’s Tree Panic”… a condition where one couldn’t decide if the tree on canvas looked too spindly or too fat.
For three weeks now, he had walked every inch of the fields around Flatford and East Bergholt searching for the scene. He’d painted barns, cows, more barns, some geese that chased him, a cat he didn’t realise was dead until he finished the sketch, and an old man who turned out to be asleep in a hedge.
But nothing… nothing had the it factor.
“Too many trees!” he declared one day, flinging his sketchbook onto a bush. “It’s like the blasted things are posing. Look at that one… far too smug. And that one… It looks drunk, it’s leaning. How dare it lean?”
William, who was deeply fond of trees, stroked one consolingly.

The moment came suddenly.
It was a Wednesday, or possibly a Thursday (Constable had never kept a calendar), and the artist had wandered off in frustration, mumbling about selling all his paints and becoming a clergyman.
As William searched for him, Constable’s voice called out from somewhere near the millpond.
“William! William, come quickly!”
Fearing that the artist had fallen into a cowpat, William sprinted toward the voice, only to find Constable standing knee-deep again in the river, staring across at an ordinary-looking cottage, a wooden cart half-submerged, and a dog relieving itself against a fence.
“This is it,” Constable breathed.
William blinked. “This… is what?”
“This!” He flung his arms wide, accidentally hitting a duck. “This scene! The cottage, the cart, the river… the very soul of England! It’s not dramatic like a storm over Venice. It’s not theatrical like a castle in the Alps. It’s simple. Modest. Honest. Like a man who eats porridge for every meal.”
William wrinkled his nose. “You’ve had quite a lot of sun.”
“Don’t you see?” Constable’s voice rose to that octave he reserved for creative excitement and bee stings. “This is how the people live. They don’t reside on mountaintops… they trudge through fields and rivers hauling hay carts. The poetry is in the puddles!”
The duck quacked supportively.

The scene had, in fact, always been there. The cottage belonged to W***y Lott, an old acquaintance of Constable’s who had once mistaken the artist’s sketch of a sheep for a roast chicken.
W***y emerged now from the house, yawning and scratching his head.
“Mornin’,” he called, entirely unfazed by a painter gesticulating wildly in his river.
“Muse!” Constable cried. “W***y, you are my muse!”
W***y looked alarmed. “I ain’t done nuffin’, sir.”
But it was too late. Constable had whipped out his sketchbook and was furiously sketching. The cart, the millpond, the cottage. It all came to life beneath his pencil like a revelation from the gods of rustic charm.
“There will be clouds,” Constable murmured, “yes… and reeds! The horse shall look noble, yet weary. And the cart shall not be crossing the river, but pausing in it, as if lost in thought.”
William frowned. “That’s… a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? It’s literally just stuck.”
“Symbolism, William! Symbolism! This painting shall be called… ‘Scene with River Cart and House.’”
William looked at him.
“Too much?” Constable asked.
“A bit.”
“Then what about… The Hay Cart?”
“Meh.”
“…The Hay Thingy?”
William shrugged. “Not catchy.”
“Fine,” Constable sighed. “The Hay Wain.”

Having chosen his subject, Constable now faced a major obstacle: the horse. The actual horse in the scene… a lazy grey nag named Turnip… had no sense of drama or majesty whatsoever. It had one good eye, three bad teeth, and a tail like soggy straw.
“You expect that to represent the working spirit of England?” William asked.
“He’s all I’ve got,” Constable muttered. “I’ll paint him from the good side.”
Turnip let out a mildly disconcerting fart.

Word soon spread that Constable was working on something grand. Not grand in the usual sense… there were no gods, nymphs, or grand ladies reclining on velvet, but rather grand in its… humdrum.
A group of local gentry came by to watch him paint. One brought a folding chair. Another brought cheese.
“Is that a cart in a pond?” asked Sir Belvedere Thistlethwaite, scratching his monocle.
“Indeed,” Constable replied. “It’s The Hay Wain.”
“Oh. I thought it was a boat.”
A woman in a feathered bonnet squinted at the cottage. “Shouldn’t there be more columns?”
“No,” Constable said. “It’s not a palace. It’s a real home.”
They murmured among themselves. Someone coughed. The cheese was passed around.
Eventually, they left. One man whispered, “He should have painted Bath.”

The painting, when finally exhibited in 1821 at the Royal Academy, received a lukewarm response.
Some praised its ‘charming details’, others yawned, and one gentleman, allegedly a fan of Turner, declared, “It’s a little moist, isn’t it?”
But over time, like wine, or Stilton, or William’s pork pies, it ripened in people’s affections.
It was sent to France… France ( of all places) !, where people painted naked gods and men with suspiciously large spears… and there, the French loved it.
Théodore Géricault reportedly declared it a masterpiece. French critics, often more generous than their British counterparts (particularly when the work wasn’t theirs), admired the light, the structure, and most of all, the weather.
Constable wrote home jubilantly.
“They understand me, William! They understand clouds!”

Years later, as tourists wandered along the River Stour in search of “the very spot,” Constable’s vision had become immortal.
W***y Lott’s cottage would go on to be more famous than W***y himself. The horse was forgotten. The dog never got a credit. The ducks went unrecognised. But The Hay Wain remained a triumph… not just of landscape, but of love for the ordinary.

Constable never painted angels or empires. He painted what he knew: his home, his fields, the clouds over his head, and the very human cart stuck in the middle of a stream.
As for William? He opened a moderately successful tea shop named The Hay Café, selling tiny pork pies and copies of the painting on coasters.

On his deathbed, Constable was said to murmur, “It was always the clouds.”
To which William, ever loyal, replied: “Yes, and the mud.”
Constable grinned faintly. “No mud… no masterpiece.”
And so it was that one of the most celebrated works in British art came from a splash of river water, a horse named Turnip, a cottage of a man who rarely left home, and a painter who saw not just landscape, but life.
And all because one day, John Constable stood in a bog and shouted, “This is it!”

( I shall be leading a small group tour to East Anglia in 2026 and 2027, and we shall stand in front of the mill and learn a little more about Constable and his life and times. I wrote this slightly comic tale to bring the man to life in the hope that it will raise a curiosity in you, and perhaps the wish to travel )

06/08/2025

I was but sixteen years old, and the salt had only just begun to etch its way into my bones. The schooner HMS Pickle was my first posting, an odd name for a ship, some said, but I had come to believe there was no finer vessel afloat in the service of King George. She was small, only five cannon, and sleek as a whalebone comb. Her crew numbered barely fifty souls, yet all of us had been bound together by a cause that gave our days a strange kind of nobility. We were not merchants. We were not pirates. We were, as our captain called us, “chain-breakers.”

It was June, 1829. The Caribbean heat clung like a damp coat, and our sails hung heavy in still air. We’d been weeks out of Jamaica, cruising the warm waters near Cuba, where the Spanish and Portuguese still ran their bloody business with impunity, sn**ching men, women, and children from the coasts of Africa and shipping them like cargo to the plantations of the New World.
Captain J.B.B. MacHardy, a Scot with the wiry patience of a stonemason and eyes like flint, had word of a slaver prowling nearby, a brig named Voladora, Spanish-built, and swift. It was said she carried over three hundred souls below deck, bought with gunpowder and rum on the African coast. MacHardy called us to arms with a soft, grim tone. “We’ll not let another coffin-ship pass unchecked.”
We sighted her on the night of June the fifth. The moon was thin and the stars sharp, casting silver light on the gently rocking sea. The Voladora was larger than we expected, her hull high and bristling with gunports. She flew no flag, but there was no mistaking her shape. The air smelled of fear, sweat, and something fouler still… a scent I would learn to associate with the death-deck of a slave ship.
MacHardy gave the order. “Close in. Guns ready.”
I was on the port gun with Lieutenant Braithwaite, a lean man with a permanent sneer and hands that shook before battle. He held them steady that night.
The first volley came from Voladora. Her broadside roared, and the sea around us exploded in foam. Cannonballs smashed our quarterdeck, splinters flying like knives. We lost two men in the first volley. Still we pressed on.
For eighty minutes, the darkness flashed with gunfire and thundered with shouts. We closed within musket-shot. I saw their helmsman fall, slumped over the wheel. Then, with a shriek of timber, Voladora’s mainmast cracked, toppled, and fell like a felled tree into the sea, dragging half her rigging with it.
We grappled her. MacHardy, sabre drawn, led the charge across the narrowing gap.
The deck was chaos. Smoke, shouting, blood. I fired my pistol into the shoulder of a man raising a cutlass at Braithwaite, then drew my own blade, swinging wildly. There were cries in Spanish, screams from below deck, and above it all the bellows of dying men.

At last, a white cloth waved from what was left of the foremast. They had surrendered.
Our dead numbered four. The Spaniards lost at least fourteen. But the worst came after.
Below deck, packed tighter than grain in a silo, were over three hundred men and women. I remember the silence when we opened the hatches. They didn’t cry out. They stared, their eyes hollow with horror. The stench drove several of our men retching to the rails. Thirty-two had already perished on the voyage.
We freed them, one by one, lifting them into the light. Some kissed our hands. Others stared at the sea in mute disbelief. Two hundred and twenty-three men, ninety-seven women. Names we never knew, lives that had been bought like salt pork and bound for torture.
MacHardy ordered the slaver crew chained in their own holds. “Let them lie where they would have laid others,” he said.
We set course for Freetown, in Sierra Leone… a British colony founded for freed slaves. We could not return them to their villages. Slavers would be waiting to sn**ch them again. Some wept when they learned they would never see home again. Some wept in joy. Some wept and never stopped.
Word of our action spread quickly.
Five days later, another schooner of His Majesty’s Navy, HMS Monkey, under the command of Lieutenant Joseph Sherer, encountered the Spanish brig Midas. The Midas was a beast, four eighteen-pounders, four twelves, and a crew of over fifty. The Monkey? A single twelve-pounder gun and twenty-six brave men.
They engaged anyway.
For thirty-five minutes, the sea off the Cuban coast once more echoed with British cannon fire. Sherer’s men fought like demons. When the smoke cleared, Midas had struck her colors.
Onboard were 562 Africans. Only 369 had survived the crossing.
I saw the Monkey days later in port. The men were gaunt but proud. They had painted a chain in white across the hull, a symbol of their purpose.
Earlier that same year, the Monkey had already seized two more slavers, an American and another Spanish vessel. The odds had been similarly daunting. Yet time and again, the flag of St. George flew victoriously over evil.

These were not isolated acts.
Long before I joined the Navy, Britain had begun her war against slavery, not only in law, but at sea, with fire and steel.
In 1807, amid the roar of the Napoleonic wars, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. That same year, warships were dispatched to West Africa, not to fight Napoleon, but to challenge the merchants of death who prowled those coasts in pursuit of flesh.
After Waterloo, the fight intensified. In 1816, Admiral Lord Exmouth… his white hair tucked beneath his bicorn… sailed with twenty-one warships to Algiers. Their demand: the end of Christian slavery in North Africa.
When the Dey refused, Exmouth opened fire. Forty thousand cannonballs and shells rained down. Ships exploded. The harbour burned. Much of the city lay in ruins. And over a thousand Christian slaves, mostly Spaniards and Italians, walked free.
The lesson was made clear by further displays of British might in Tunis in 1824 and again off Algiers. Wherever men were chained, Britain sailed her navy.
In 1827, in the Bay of Navarino, we took it further still. British firepower shattered the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet, helping Greece win independence… and in doing so, ending the trade in Greek slaves. I was not there, but MacHardy was. He told us the water had run black with oil and red with blood.
“The slave trade,” he said, “is the breath of empire for some. But Britain will not breathe it.”

Our base of operations was often Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was a strange place… a colony built for liberty on a continent still rife with bo***ge. It had been founded decades earlier for freed men and women, and it bustled with hope and contradiction.
Slaves we rescued could not return home. If they did, rival tribes… sometimes the very same who sold them the first time, would take them again. So they stayed. Some took English names. Some became Christians. Some joined the navy. Many simply tried to forget the horrors of the slave decks.
I met one man there, Isaac. He had been taken from the Bight of Benin. His wife had died aboard a Portuguese slaver. We had rescued him weeks after. He never smiled. But when he spoke of the British flag, he touched his chest.
“Red cross means breath,” he said. “I breathe because of it.”

Back home in Britain, our actions were being painted… literally. In parlours and taverns from Dover to Dundee, patriotic paintings hung above hearths, showing the Pickle and the Monkey besting leviathans of evil. Artists captured the crack of our guns, the agony of the slavers, the soft release of the enslaved.
Children read ballads of our triumphs. Mothers told tales of Captain MacHardy and Lieutenant Sherer. The names of Pickle and Monkey, humble though they were, came to mean something mighty.
{Yet today, I hear talk that Britain’s history is nothing but a catalogue of cruelty. That our empire was only oppression. That our power brought only ruin.
I do not deny our past has shadows. What power does not?}

But I saw, with my own eyes, men and women rise from hellish holds into the light. I saw sailors fall, not for gold or conquest, but for principle, for a belief that no man, woman, or child should be chained like an animal.
I saw the might of empire wielded to shatter the very engines of slavery. For decades, our navy patrolled the Atlantic. We spent lives, treasure, and years pressing reluctant allies and enemies alike to end this vile trade. We enforced treaties. We fought at sea. We made it our mission.
In 1862, long after my own service ended, Prime Minister Palmerston still spoke with fire: “Slavery,” he said, “is only half the evil. For every man chained, a village burns. A child is orphaned. A culture is undone.”
He knew, as I did, that to fight slavery was not just to fight chains, it was to fight the chaos left behind by them.

And so I write this tale not in vanity, nor even for glory, but in remembrance.
Let it not be said that Britain did nothing.
Let it not be forgotten that schooners like the Pickle, with her patched sails and creaking decks, sailed with the fire of justice in her belly.
We were small.
But we were many.
And we were brave.
We were the chain-breakers of the Caribbean.

( I write these tales to encourage curiosity… and travel. When visiting the UK think in this fascinating period in the nations history. You will find signs of it everywhere)

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