End Notes

1. Port Townsend, Washington was a major seaport during its Victorian heyday in the mid-late 1800s. It has a distinct geographical separation between downtown and uptown, thanks to a series of steep bluffs set back about five or six blocks from the waterfront. Downtown is where the docks, warehouses, commercial buildings, and hotels were. And saloons. Lots of saloons. Uptown was were middle and upper-middle class families lived. Wealthy merchants and ship’s captains built big houses uptown for their families. Elliot Bishop’s house is one of these.

2. There was a Delmonico Hotel and Saloon on Water Street in downtown Port Townsend. The hotel operated from 1888-1962 and the saloon stayed in business until 1974. Tonight (in the book) is Sunday, February 26, 1888 and I don’t know the exact date the Delmonico opened, so I may have jumped the gun a bit on the timeline here. It won’t be the last time I fudged the timeline of historical events in this town to fit the story.

3. A certificate that attested to a seaman’s skill and character to captain (master) a ship. A master’s certificate wasn’t strictly required at this time to be a ship’s master, but it served as a recommendation to ship owners and ships sailing with a certified shipmaster could get preferential insurance rates.

4. I was initially going to write this story with Declan as an actual pirate and set it closer to the middle of the 1800s, during the golden age of sail. I have a bit of a romantic thing about pirates, even though there wasn’t really anything romantic about pirates, then or now. I watched a lot of Pirates of the Caribbean, naturally, before starting this book. But honestly, I really didn’t want to set the book in the midst of slave-owning colonialism and the American Civil War. And then I went with a friend to a writing retreat that took place in Port Townsend because the author leading the retreat lived in the area (and believe me, Port Townsend is an excellent place to host a writing retreat!). When she learned that I was in the beginning stages of writing a shipboard romance, she encouraged me to look into Port Townsend’s history and here we are.

5. Okay, yes, this book started out as an historical version of “Dad’s on a hunting trip and he hasn’t been home in a few days.” Supernatural meets Pirates of the Caribbean. But with tentacles. It was always going to have tentacles.

6. Friday Harbor is on San Juan Island, one of an archipelago of islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the body of water between Washington’s Olympic peninsula (where Port Townsend is located) and Canada’s Vancouver Island. Cape Flattery is the furthest northwest tip of the contiguous United States and there is a lighthouse there, on Tatoosh Island, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets the Pacific Ocean. Nootka Sound is an inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, about halfway up that long island. Declan’s voyages between San Francisco and Nootka Sound are probably around 800 nautical miles or so each way, give or take, depending on where he stops and how much he hugs the coastline, which is pretty treacherous in a lot of places on the west coast of the US and Vancouver Island.

7. Declan and his father are legitimate traders and merchants but there was a lot of smuggling going on between British Columbia and the US around this time—whiskey, cigars, opium, etc.—so they did their fair share of smuggling, too. There was a fair bit of people smuggling in and around Port Townsend, too, of Chinese immigrants seeking a better life in the US.

8. I have a thing about old maps and charts. In my head, this one is an amalgamation of several antique charts I looked at from the period. Someday, I’ll commission an illustrated version of it.

9. There was a huge tidal wave in December 1866 that flooded pretty much the entire downtown area. It was thought to have been caused by an eruption under the ocean, not a storm. And since it occurred about seven years before I needed Elliot’s mother to disappear, I made up this additional storm.

10. The Captain’s not wrong here.

11. I mean, honestly, a young lady of Celeste’s standing would not be living in her fiancé’s house before their wedding, especially since her mother lives just down the street. But I needed to set up the conflict between Elliot’s efforts to live a normal, safe life (including getting married to a girl that…well, you’ll see) and his complicated feelings about his stepbrother. So this is how I did it. I really had very little sense of Celeste when I started writing this. She turned out much different than I expected her to be.

12. Bit of anachronistic slang here—I doubt anyone used this phrase in the late 1880s. But it’s one of my favorite phrases and fits Declan’s personality.

13. This is true. Declan is a rake, for sure, and he’ll tempt and tease, but he’s conscious of the importance of consent.

14. But will you, Elliot? And does she make you happy?