28 | October | 2015 | Shenandoah Down Under

Oh dear, in this new episode, the feuding on board the ship has reached new heights, with Surgeon McNulty calling Mr Blacker an “English Irish Orangeman”, and thereby deftly uniting race and religion in one deadly insult.

Can things get worse? Can they ever! When Executive Officer Whittle tries to remonstrate with the drunken McNulty, McNulty “shows him his pistol” and there is a physical altercation. This can only mean one thing between gentlemen, and that is a duel (of course if McNulty was an ordinary crewman XO Whittle would have cheerfully had him triced up in irons and a gag, so it is good to be a gentleman after all…)

As if this was not enough for one episode, Rob finally delivers on his promise to describe how to measure the height of an iceberg using a sextant. To use this method you need one or more icebergs, a sextant, a moving ship, and a knowledge of trigonometry.

As Rob admittedly has none of these things the result is something of a thought experiment; however he does also describe an old loggers’ trick for working out if a tree you’re cutting down will fall on your house, using only your arm and a stick. What is the essential requirement for the length of the stick? Find out in the 48th episode of Shenandoah Down Under, aka Confederate Pirates Save the Whales, the one where men show their pistols (to other men).