The Devil to Pay is one of a series of nautical novels by C. Northcote Parkinson. It is set in the late 18th Century, when Britain was at war with Revolutionary France. Parkinson's hero is a junior naval officer. Unlike many fictional officers, Parkinson's hero, Richard Delancey, does not have any powerful patrons to ease his way to promotion.
The novel starts with Delancey accepting the temporary command of a small cutter. Delancey is from the Island of Guernsey, and is fluent in French. His knowledge of French will make it easier for him to land Royalist agents who are part of a plan to prepare for an invasion to restore the French monarchy.
This secret mission appears to have been a failure. And it leaves Delancey on the beach, living on his half-pay.
So he leaps at a chance to accept the temporary command of a small customs vessel. He is unexpectedly successful at intercepting smuggled goods so one of the owners of some of the smuggling vessels offers him the much better position of command of a privateer.
He is a successful privateer commander. He has several successful cruises. But, eventually his ship is wrecked on the enemy shore. Delancey and some of his remaining crew decide to try to escape back to England. During their escape Delancey acquires some valuable intelligence.
With the aid of a smuggler who works for his boss he is able to make contact with an RN frigate cruising offshore. The Captain of that vessel mounts an expedition to rescue Delancey and recover the secret papers. One of his lieutenants is lost. And Delancey is offered to take his place.
The novel ends with Delancey again serving in the Royal Navy.
It is believed that the phrase The Devil to Pay refers to the task of caulking, or paying, the deck seams with hot pitch. The outermost seam—between the deck and the hull—is the hardest to caulk. It is called the devil. The full phrase is The devil to pay, and no pitch hot—more generally the phrase is used to refer to any urgent, desperate situation. However this has been disputed in numerous sources and WorldWideWords.com references the phrase as:
"It’s more probable that the phrase was a reference to a Faustian bargain, a pact with Satan, and to the inevitable payment to be made to him in the end. Its earliest appearances at about the beginning of the eighteenth century certainly have no hint of a naval origin or context. Here’s an example written by Jonathan Swift in 1738: 'I must be with my Wife on Tuesday, or there will be the Devil and all to pay'."
This novel was the first Parkinson wrote. The next novel in the series is The Fireship . Parkinson later went back and wrote a prequel, The Guernseyman , set during the American Revolution.
'all those C.S. Forester fans are going to pick it up tenderly' Sunday Telegraph1
'Mr Parkinson is an expert on naval history and on sailing, and this bracing, well-plotted and exiting story reveals his knowledge' Books and Bookmen1
'The action is good, the historical detail impeccable' Spectator1
Caulk or, less frequently, caulking is a material used to seal joints or seams against leakage in various structures and piping.
Richard Dale was an American naval officer who fought in the Continental Navy under John Barry and was first lieutenant for John Paul Jones during the naval battle off of Flamborough Head, England against HMS Serapis in the celebrated engagement of September 23, 1779. He became one of the six original commodores of the permanent United States Navy, and commanded a blockade of Tripoli in 1801 during the First Barbary War of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.
Admiral Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, GCB was a British naval officer. He fought during the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars. His younger brother Israel Pellew also pursued a naval career.
Woodes Rogers was an English sea captain, privateer, slave trader and, from 1718, the first Royal Governor of the Bahamas. He is known as the captain of the vessel that rescued marooned Alexander Selkirk, whose plight is generally believed to have inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
The Fireship is one of a series of nautical novels by C. Northcote Parkinson. It is set in the late 18th century, when Britain was at war with Revolutionary France. Parkinson's hero is a junior naval officer. Unlike many fictional officers Parkinson's hero, Richard Delancey, does not have any powerful patrons to ease his way to promotion.
Rear Admiral Hon. George Heneage Lawrence Dundas CB was a senior officer in the Royal Navy. As a junior officer he came to prominence due to his brave conduct during a fire on the first-rate HMS Queen Charlotte. As a result of this he was appointed to the command of the sixth-rate HMS Calpe in which he took part in the Battle of Algeciras Bay in July 1801 during the French Revolutionary Wars. After serving for four years as Whig Member of Parliament for Richmond, he was given command of the fifth-rate HMS Euryalus and took part in the unsuccessful Walcheren Campaign in July 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars. He transferred to the third-rate HMS Edinburgh and landed troops at Viareggio in Italy in November 1812 later in that War. He went on to be Member of Parliament for Orkney and Shetland and became First Naval Lord in the First Melbourne ministry in August 1834 but died in office just two months later in October 1834.
William Day was a Springfield, Massachusetts, sea captain who acted against America's enemies in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. In 1777 he received the first gun salute to an American fighting vessel in a European port.
HMS Dido was one of the twenty-seven Enterprise class of 28-gun sixth-rate frigates in service with the Royal Navy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dido was commissioned in September 1787 under the command of Captain Charles Sandys. She participated in a notable action for which her crew would later be awarded the Naval General Service Medal; her participation in a campaign resulted in the award of another. Dido was sold for breaking up in 1817.
HMS Spitfire was a Tisiphone-class fireship of the Royal Navy. She served during the years of peace following the end of the American War of Independence, and by the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, had been reclassified as a 14-gun sloop-of-war. Spitfire went on to serve under a number of notable commanders during a successful career that saw her capture a considerable number of French privateers and small naval vessels. She spent most of her career in Home waters, though during the later part of her life she sailed further afield, to the British stations in North America and West Africa. She survived the Napoleonic Wars and was eventually sold in 1825 after a period spent laid up.
HMS Hermes was a 20-gun Hermes-class sixth-rate flush-decked sloop-of-war built in Milford Dockyard to the lines of the ex-French Bonne Citoyenne. She was destroyed in 1814 to prevent her falling into American hands after grounding during her unsuccessful attack on Fort Bowyer on Mobile Point outside Mobile, Alabama.
HMS Blanche was a 32-gun Hermione-class fifth rate of the Royal Navy. She was ordered towards the end of the American War of Independence, but only briefly saw service before the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793. She enjoyed a number of successful cruises against privateers in the West Indies, before coming under the command of Captain Robert Faulknor. He took the Blanche into battle against a superior opponent and after a hard-fought battle, forced the surrender of the French frigate Pique. Faulknor was among those killed on the Blanche. She subsequently served in the Mediterranean, where she had the misfortune of forcing a large Spanish frigate to surrender, but was unable to secure the prize, which then escaped. Returning to British waters she was converted to a storeship and then a troopship, but did not serve for long before being wrecked off the Texel in 1799.
HMS Atalante was a 16-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy. She was formerly the French Atalante, captured in 1797. She served with the British during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was wrecked in 1807.
Surveillante entered service as a 40-gun Virginie-class frigate of the French Navy. She was surrendered to the British in 1803, after which she served in the Royal Navy, classed under the British system as a 38-gun vessel, until 1814 when she was decommissioned. HMS Surveillante had a long and active career under two successful and distinguished commanders, from the Baltic to the northwestern coasts of France, Spain and Portugal, and was present at the Battle of Copenhagen (1807) and throughout the Peninsula War. Her record as a taker of prizes is notable for its success, particularly towards the end of her career.
John MacBride was a British officer of the Royal Navy and a politician who saw service during the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars, eventually rising to the rank of Admiral of the Blue.
HMS Scorpion was a Royal Navy Cruizer-class brig-sloop built by John King at Dover and launched in 1803. She was the first of the class to be built since the launching of Cruizer in 1797. Scorpion had a long and active career during the Napoleonic Wars, earning her crews three clasps to the Naval General Service Medal when the Admiralty authorized it in 1847, two for single-ship actions. She also took a number of prizes. Scorpion was sold in 1819.
The Battle of Delaware Bay, or the Battle of Cape May, was a naval engagement fought between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States during the American Revolutionary War. A British squadron of three vessels attacked three American privateers that were escorting a fleet of merchantmen. The ensuing combat in Delaware Bay near Cape May ended with an American victory over a superior British force.
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the Admiralty also made use of hired armed vessels, one of which was His Majesty's Hired armed cutter Swan. Actually there were two such cutters, but the descriptions of these vessels and the dates of their service are such that they may well represent one vessel under successive contracts. The vessel or vessels cruised, blockaded, carried despatches and performed reconnaissance.
HMS Anacreon was a French privateer launched in 1798 that the Royal Navy captured in 1799 and took into service. She had a brief career in which she took some minor prizes and engaged two enemy vessels in an inconclusive action. She was sold in December 1802.
HMS Nymphe was a fifth-rate frigate of the British Royal Navy, formerly the French Nymphe, lead ship of her class. HMS Flora, under the command of Captain William Peere Williams, captured Nymphe off Ushant on 10 August 1780. Indiscriminately referred to as Nymph, Nymphe, La Nymph or La Nymphe in contemporary British sources, she served during the American, French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. On 19 May 1793, while under the command of Captain Edward Pellew, she captured the frigate Cléopâtre, the first French warship captured in a single-ship action of the war. After a long period of service in which she took part in several notable actions and made many captures, Nymphe was wrecked off the coast of Scotland on 18 December 1810.
The Battle of Port Louis was a minor naval engagement of the French Revolutionary Wars, fought on 11 December 1799 at the mouth of the Tombeau River near Port Louis on the French Indian Ocean island of Île de France, later known as Mauritius. Preneuse had originally been part of a powerful squadron of six frigates sent to the Indian Ocean in 1796 under the command of Contre-amiral Pierre César Charles de Sercey, but the squadron dispersed in 1798 and by the summer of 1799 Preneuse was the only significant French warship remaining in the region. The battle was the culmination of a three-month raiding cruise by the 40-gun French Navy frigate Preneuse, commanded by Captain Jean-Matthieu-Adrien Lhermitte. Ordered to raid British commerce in the Mozambique Channel, Lhermitte's cruise had been eventful, with an inconclusive encounter with a squadron of small British warships in Algoa Bay on 20 September and an engagement with the 50-gun HMS Jupiter during heavy weather on 9–11 October.
1 Devil to Pay ( ISBN 0 413 36910 2) back cover