*"Amazing Grace," also known in hymn books as "New Britain," was not set to the tune we know, "Virginia Harmony," until 1831.
Jamaica 's south coast, and escape a lifetime of slavery, chains, whips, and cruel misery, to join the Royal Navy under new aliases as "free men." Seemed like a great idea, then, when his ship had been so short of hands after so many of his British tars had died of Yellow Jack, but now, though…
"… many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have al-ready come!
'Tis Grace hath bro 't me safe, thus far,
and Grace will lead me home!"
"Something should," Lewrie muttered; "lead 'em home, very far from me," he added under his breath. Listening to the harmonies of his Black sailors, no matter how loyally and stoutly they had served, he could not help but add a fretful "Damn 'em!"
CHAPTER TWO
In retrospect, perhaps-and one could safely assume that retrospection was an activity at which Alan Lewrie had come to excel over the course of a few months (and just might have been acclaimed as the champion retro-spector of the age… were prizes given for such, of course)-he really should have twigged to the fact that something was "rotten in Denmark" when he received that extremely odd, dare we say outre, invitation from Capt. Nicely, back in the summer when he was still based out of Kingston, Jamaica, to wit: Capt. Nicely requested that he be dined-in aboard Proteus by Capt. Lewrie, not the other way round.
Well, Nicely was a kindly sort, though a bit of a bull in the china shop, an aggressive, "but me not buts" sort, so Lewrie had thought little odd about it, at the time. Capt. Nicely had played "Dutch Uncle" to him since their first meeting at Port-au-Prince in 1797 and had supported his activities, dismissing the vituperative charges that the dyspeptic Capt.