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About
The Author
Joseph was born
February 16, 1950 in Jacksonville, Florida. He started life as the
son of a commercial fisherman.
His father first took him to sea at age four.
He spent his early youth on the shrimping grounds of St.
Augustine, Cape Canaveral and Key West, Florida.
Usually the fishing boats only went to
sea in good weather but one trip caught the boat on
the edge of a hurricane. The
adults were frightened but for a seven year old, tied in the
wheelhouse chair, riding the 30-foot waves and sliding downward
into the trough between the waves was like a ride at a carnival.
The happiest times of Joseph's childhood were on those
trips to the fishing grounds.
Joseph was adopted
at age eleven and settled into a life ashore.
His love of the sea never died. He visited the local docks
talking to the fishermen almost every day. Joseph read every
nautical book he could get his hands on and watched every movie
about the sea, from pirates and age of sail to the modern stories
of World War 2. His heroes were the great ships and the men who
sailed them. Eventually the call of the sea was too strong. Joseph
ran away in his senior year of high school to join the U. S. Navy.
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Joseph spent two
enlistments in the Navy where he completed 7 progressively
advanced Navy schools from basic seamanship through Nondestructive
Testing and obtained his high school GED and a few collage credits
while working his way up to First Class Petty Officer. Joseph
spent two cruises on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy that
took him to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the Mediterranean
and Caribbean Sea. He
visited ports steeped in nautical history in France, Spain, Italy,
Greece, Turkey, Scotland, and Jamaica.
When he returned
home to St. Augustine, with his growing family, he found a changed
and dwindling fishing industry with no need for an 27 year old man
with family responsibilities and too long out of the business.
Joseph used his
Navy training and went to work at the local aircraft factory.
He soon discovered a knack
for writing technical proposals, factory capabilities books,
corporate policies/procedures and a few employee position
descriptions. He has achieved positions as Inspection Manager,
Industrial Engineering Supervisor and Facilities Planning
Supervisor.
Joseph never
lost his love of the sea and sea stories. He has read all of C. S.
Forester, Patrick O’Brien, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope and
dozens of other author’s sea stories. He read so many, so fast
that they could not be published fast enough. He would wait
for months for the latest book to be published. |
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Joseph's wife,
Chris, persuaded him to write his own sea stories while waiting
for Alexander Kent’s ‘Second to None” to be published. He
started writing as a naval officer at the Hart of Oaks role
playing site on line, where he created Nathan Beauchamp, a British
Naval officer in 1803. Soon the role playing was not enough.
Joseph researched British naval histories and started to write the
Nathan Beauchamp series.
With his books
Joseph provides the reader with a fast paced, action filled,
sea story without the great detail to ship and sail handling found
in most books of this genre. His style provides new readers an
entry to the much more detailed books of the great authors whose
works he loves. Forester, Kent, Pope, Lambdin, Stockwin, O'Brian,
White, Nelson and so many more have provided him with many hours
of reading pleasure as their protagonists waged war in the age of
sail.
Joseph hopes his
readers will enjoy the Nathan Beauchamp series as much as he
enjoys writing it
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