Distraction, Procrastination and a fictional Island Fortress

December 17, 2009, 1:53 pm

Caught in a storm of distracting personal projects, I have been driven onto a lee shore mapping The Surgeon's Mate. A vague starting point, through a fictional Kraken Channel, onto a fictional sand bank and then a rendezvous at a fictional island fortress.

So, with few concrete reference points, I was left to my habit of obsessive guesswork to determine the course of the Ariel's chase of the Minnie, The Minnie's grounding and then the mock chase to Grimsholm.

After a number of alternative routes, painstakingly plotted and then discarded in disgust, I settled on a vague south easterly chase towards the fictional Grimsholm, on the Pomeranian shore west of Danzig. I used the following as my points of reference:

  • The rendezvous with the Minne occurs quite close to Carlscrona.
  • The Minne, carrying French officers for the fortress, runs south east. Presumably, she is heading directly towards Grimsholm
  • The sandbank needs to be close enough to the mainland to make the Frenchmen's escape by boat plausible.
  • Grimsholm itself must be somewhere near the shoreline, as the Frenchmen intended to reach shore and ride to the island.

With that particularly fiddly piece of mapping I am hoping that mapping the rest of the The Surgeon's Mate will follow more reliable and concrete locales.

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