By Carla Kelly 

One perk of writing short stories and novels is that I occasionally meet interesting people. Sometimes it borders on the amazing - never more so than when I wrote my latest novel, Beau Crusoe.
When I started the novel in 2004, I needed a marvelous name and found one: James Trevenen. I had wanted my hero, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy in 1810, to be from Cornwall. Trevenen is a Cornish name, so I was set.
The real James Trevenen sailed as a midshipman with the renowned Capt. James Cook in 1776 on Cook’s third voyage of discovery. The fictional James I chose to write about was part of a later era. Since all I was doing was borrowing his name, it hardly mattered. He had no copyright on his name.
I wrote the novel. It was published this spring, received good reviews, and so on. A few weeks ago, I received a most interesting e-mail from Australia, sent by Gary Trevenen, a financial analyst .
Gary had read an online interview I had given to a Web Site about Beau Crusoe, and he wanted to tell me (as Paul Harvey says) the rest of the story.
Gary is a distant relative of the real James Trevenen. He wanted me to know that he and his wife named their 8-year-old son James, in honor of that long-ago, seafaring man. Gary also included part of a biography of James Trevenen, written in 1850.
According to the introduction, after the voyage with Cook, and other voyages, Trevenen offered his services to Russia’s Catherine the Great. Such mercenary work was not uncommon. When England was not at war, captains in the Royal Navy often found themselves on shore without a ship, and living on half-pay.
It happened here, too. After his brilliant victories for the fledgling United States, John Paul Jones (a Scot), also served in the Russian navy, because things got slow in the U.S. Navy.
James Trevenen died at age 31 in the service of Catherine in a 1790 sea battle against the Swedish navy. He had been married a year before to Elizabeth Farquharson, and became the father of a daughter shortly before his death in battle. I learned this in e-mails from Gary, who also told me of his ancestor’s brush with history.
Apparently, James had been recommended to captain the H.M.S. Bounty, bound for the South Seas. For political reasons, this commission was overturned by a higher-up in the Admiralty, and the job went to (oops) Capt. William Bligh.  Alas, Bligh irritated underlings on the Bounty and is now best-known for the Mutiny on the Bounty, which occurred in 1789.
Gary wrote: “Bligh was a fine sailor, but he had a fierce temper. James, on the other hand, appears to have had no vices to speak of. How different history might have been!”
Indeed. Hollywood would have suffered, too, without the Mutiny. There would have been no movies starring Charles Laughton as Capt. Bligh and Clark Gable as mutineer Fletcher Christian. Ditto Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando, and Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.
Under Capt. James Trevenen, there probably would have been no mutiny. Pitcairn Island, where the mutineers settled, would just be inhabited by goony birds and land crabs.
So it goes. Because e-mail acquaintances are casual, I teased Gary a bit, saying I didn’t think the middle-class, respectable Trevenens were “First Fleet” material – those convicts banished to colonize Australia in 1788. How did his ancestors get there?  In a prompt return, Gary assured me the Trevenens first came to Australia as miners (a prominent Cornish occupation), and emphatically not as jailbirds. In fact, Gary said he was born in Ballarat, the site of a huge gold rush in the 1850s.
What an enjoyable e-mail conversation that was. I mailed Gary an autographed copy of Beau Crusoe. Last week, he sent me back a photo of his son, James, holding the book, so I could see what a “real” James Trevenen looks like.
Gary also answered my question about pronouncing “Trevenen.” As it turns out, I was pronouncing it correctly, but it’s nice to get a response from the man who actually uses the name, day in and out.
    I also told Gary we might be related. The Farquharson name is a close step to Fergusson, which is my family clan.
    Small world.