My handwriting’s pretty good – though you’ll have to take my word for it, obviously! – but my partner’s is ‘ant meandering across the page’ bad and some of the handwritten texts I’ve worked with on transcription projects or in my previous academic life are head-achingly awful.

But I’m always up for a challenge when it comes to deciphering the past and I was really excited over the weekend to learn that I’ve been chosen to participate in a fascinating project transcribing the diary of Admiral Sir Francis Austen, older brother to the much more famous Jane. Over 2,000 people applied to work on this transcription so it’s an honour to have been chosen.

Here’s a little snippet of the extract I’ve been sent by the Jane Austen’s House Museum and it’s dramatic stuff as we join Frank Austen in December 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars and right in the midst of chasing ‘seven strange Ships… evidently Enemies’ (it’s those French!) somewhere in the Atlantic between Cadiz and the Canary Islands.

The French turn out to be too fast for the English ships, which instead proceed across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and then pursue another ‘French Squadron of 5 Ships of the Line’ to San Domingo.

Unfortunately, that’s where my extract ends so I can’t tell you what happens next! 😞 We’ll all just have to wait until the full transcript of the memoir is published.