Gone is the "Age of Sail" when men went to sea in search of adventure and glory. But the sea still beckons us with her mystery, her solitude, her rage. In the pages of The Powder Monkey, readers can experience the power and majesty of the sea once more. Set during the War of 1812, this seafaring novel invites us to befriend its loveable characters and takes us on the journey of a lifetime.

The scene is Fells Point, Baltimore. A bawdy harbor town whose residents are caught up in the fever for prize money following the declaration of war against Great Britain. Young Michael Dooley has just lost his mother to a different kind of fever and then learns his father is impressed on a British frigate. Saddened and confused, Michael charts out his course of action using the dictates of an ancient family code. Together with his rambunctious Uncle Bob and some faithful friends, Michael joins the crew of a privateer captained by the gallant and audacious Thomas Boyle. As a powder monkey on the fast schooner, and over the course of the war, Michael learns about love and hate, life and death, and more importantly, individual obligation.

Come, then. Set sail with shipmates true. Adventure and glory await. The tide is turning on us all.

George J. Galloway is active in his community, especially in his parish, and is the founder of the Bucks County St. Patrick’s Day Parade. A former aide to a Pennsylvania state senator, Mr. Galloway pursued a career in public life before turning back to his love of history and has been teaching history for the past five years in secondary schools. He has traveled extensively doing research on sailing ships, the history of Baltimore, and the War of 1812. He lives with his wife and three children in Fallsington, Pennsylvania. The Powder Monkey is his first novel.

June, 1812

There was something stirring him from sleep. It was something mingling with the warm, June breeze coming through his bedroom window. It was his mother. It was the scent of lilac from the soap his mother had always used in her bath. It roused him to semi-consciousness and he stretched and squirmed on the soft, eiderdown mattress while his mind reconciled the lilac with something else in the pit of his stomach: his mother was dead. Dead from the ravages of "The Fever" that had swept the Point toward the end of last summer, when the marshes surrounding the Point stagnated and provided a stench singular to tidewater areas. But, this sweet, flowery odor was comforting to Michael Dooley, Jr. As he opened his eyes, it quelled the sinking feeling in his stomach and brought a smile to his lips.

The peal of St. Patrick's burst into his ears and welcomed the new day. It was exactly six o'clock and time to pray. Ever since the 25th of March, the Annunciation, old Archbishop Carroll had requested the people of Baltimore to pray the Angelus. Years before, when the country first broke free from England, Bishop Carroll had declared the United States under the protection of the Blessed Virgin; and now, the aging shepherd, sensing conflict with England again, was reminding Our Lady of the special compact. Father John Francis Moranvillé, the French-born pastor of St. Patrick's, gave particular instructions at last Sunday's Mass that the Angelus would be said fervently throughout the Point. He was looking directly at Michael when he had given those instructions from the pulpit. Michael plopped onto his knees.

"The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary..."

It wasn't the hard, cool planks of his bedroom floor against his skinny, knobby knees that turned his attention away from the prayer his lips were forming, but the prospects of the day. First, breakfast. Before his mother died, Father John had sent a young girl to help with domestic chores in the Dooley house. She would arrive shortly after lifting her knobby, thirteen-year-old knees off the hardwood floor of St. Patrick's Free School, where, as an orphan, she had lived since losing her parents to an earlier fever epidemic. Her name is Jessica Farmer. Her father was a caulker and her mother a seamstress. Father John had taken care of her ever since with the help of a strident group of women known as the St. Patrick's Benevolent Society. The society, in which Michael's mother, Teresa, was prominent, raised funds for the orphanage and free school.

Jessica, along with having a quick mind for study, also had quick feet. Michael heard her enter the unlatched door into the house and scamper across the living room into the kitchen, and then out the back door to the chicken coop. An abrupt cackle signaled that she had succeeded in pushing over a hen's bottom to snatch two warm, fresh eggs underneath. Jessica had prayed her Angelus fervently for she was a mature, serious girl. Then she had run the five blocks from the orphanage on Apple Alley to the Dooley house on Thames Street before Michael had even finished his morning devotion. But, Michael was still organizing the day's schedule in his head, while shifting his weight from one knee to the other in an attempt at preempting the sharp pang he received from spending too much time thinking on the day's events and not enough time being fervent.