Beatrice's Revenge

By Perry Comer and Amy Carlile

Beatrice's Revenge by Amy Carlile and Perry Comer
New Bedford, Connecticut, 1777.
Ten guns. Sixty hands. One coast full of the King's trade ripe for the taking..
Henry Hennessey, owner and master of the merchantman Nightingale, outfitted her to capture British merchantmen. He first obtained from the Colonial Congress a Letter Of Marquee
Unfortunately, he dies of a privateer's wound, his widow Beatrice does the unthinkable. She takes command of his brig herself, hires a master named Steven Hemstead to fight her, and stands her own watches at the weather rail.
She learns is the trade of the marquee after vowing revenge. She learns to wet the topsails in a chase and rig a hawser astern to tame a following sea. She learns to lighten a brig nine inches and steal her over a bar a frigate cannot cross. She learns the long nine that throws true at a mile, the bar shot that strips a ship's rigging like a barber's floor, and the boarding netting that turns a packed deck into a slaughter pen. She learns that gunnery is ice and seamanship is patience, and that the man who slacks the nine parts of readiness dies in the tenth.

Across four cruises the Nightingale runs the gauntlet of the eastern war. A copper-bottomed frigate hunts her through a daylong chase that ends with a decoy lantern adrift in the dark. An Atlantic gale drives her bare-poled before mountains of water, pumps clanking, a man gone off the yard. She rakes a wool ship through the stern windows and reads her manifest at the capstan. And at the last she lies in wait at a rendezvous, disguised as her enemy's own water tender, to settle accounts with eighteen guns and a captain who wants nothing on earth but her destruction.
From the cutting-out of a fevered sugar ship by muffled oars to the nineteen most expensive minutes of the war, here is the age of fighting sail in full voice. The shriek of the boatswain's call and the thunder of a double-shotted broadside. The stink of slow match and bilge and burnt powder. The leadsman's chant in the dark, the rammer's thud, the one low note of the rigging in a fair wind.
And at the heart of it, a woman who keeps two ledgers. One counts the prizes. The other counts the dead.

By the end she knows which one rules, and she cannot leave the sea regardless.
"Either kill or quit. There is no third road."

"I've a taste for it now. And I can no more give it up than I can stop breathing."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4Q6W2KP
• ISBN13: 9798180819208
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"