Roland Nash

Captain Roland Nash is a legendary sea captain who served in the Tulwood Navy for most of his life. Now, in his late 80s and showing no sign of slowing down, he continues to lead expeditions to far off regions of the world.

Appearance

Captain Nash is a bear of a man who fills any room he occupies, both physically and metaphorically. Standing at 6'6 and weighing 230 pounds, he cuts an impressive figure, and even in his old age he can haul the sheets as well as any sailor. During his service in the navy, he kept his hair short and his beard neatly trimmed, but since his retirement he has let this grow out to an wild mane as white as the sea foam. People seeing that and the firm resolve in his sea-green eyes have described him as being "as if the seas were made flesh."

Naval Service

Captain Nash has been a man of the sea for most of his life. Starting service as a cabin boy at the tender age of eight, he was promoted at sea to midshipman within a year for his steady performance and valor above and beyond the call of duty in a boarding action that cost the lives of most of the ship's officers.
His first command was leading a prize crew taking a command of a 40-gun frigate, the TNS Dauntless, earned at the age of 27. The Dauntless was assigned to a more experienced captain, but his years of exemplery service combined with reports of his clearheaded leadership of the Dauntless prize crew saw him promoted to Commander and assigned to was promoted to Commander and given command of a 18 gun Corvette, the TNS Osprey.
Two years later, on a routine visit to a Tulwood High Seas Company outpost, Captain Nash and his crew caught the pirate ship Terror in the middle of a raid. Despite the Terror's superior size and impressive array of 64 guns, Captain Nash chose to attack, reasoning that most of the pirates would be occupied in the attack on the company town. Leaving his own ship anchored in the shallows, he had his crew row up to the larger ship in longboats and take the few pirates left aboard by surprise. They never saw it coming, most having their throats slit before they could even make a sound. With the Terror taken, the crew of the Osprey then took careful aim on the boats the pirates had used to make landfall, waited for the pirates to board, and unleashed a deadly broadside of grapeshot, slaughtering most of the pirates in a single salvo. A handful of survivors fled into the town. His one mistake was leaving the Osprey unguarded, as these few survivors managed to elude capture and eventually circled back to board the Osprey and sail away with her. Still, no other captain has managed to use a boarding action to trade up from a tiny corvette to even a small ship-of-the-line. Upon his return to Tulwood, one of his superiors jokingly said that Nash clearly would not be satisfied with anything less than a frigate, and he was promoted to Captain and granted command of the Terror, which he rechristened the TNS Confidant. (To this day, people speculate about if he meant "Confident" or "Confidence," to his eternal annoyance.)
As captain of the Confidant, Captain Nash consistently requested exploration missions and long range patrols, rather than the generally more popular positions as part of a naval battle group. As an usually young captain with little seniority, this was seen as merely accepting these minor roles with grace, but it grew increasingly anomalous to the point where some officers were embarassed to serve in his command. But Roland Nash didn't much care at this point - he had always dreamed of leading a ship and a crew of his own against the sea, and had privately lost what little taste he had for battle when he saw his crew mercilessly gun down the pirates of the Terror. Adapting to the Navy's rigid rules and regulations had always been a means to earn his captaincy.
As a captured pirate ship, the Confidant had a number of useful modifications that were not standard for most ships of its size. Its complement of 64 guns was made up of 2 decks of 20 guns much like the Dauntless, and an additional 24 guns on the weather deck, making her less stable than most ships of her size. Despite the extra weight, she was also built for speed, with 3 full-rigged masts all equipped with studding sails to help her run with the wind, as well as sweeps that could be deployed from the upper gun deck to let her maneuver against the wind. With the sweeps and stun'sls combined, she was the first ship proven capable of regularly catching up with the astonishingly fast Megaflorica.
Captain Nash's greatest accomplishment is undoubtedly charting the migration pattern of the Megaflorica islands, the several mile long specimens of floating seaweed. This, alongside his discovery of the oil produced by this plant, gave birth to a whole new industry and brought the already wealthy free city of Tulwood to new heights of wealth and power.

After the Navy

Captain Nash retired from the navy after being ordered to accept a promotion to rear admiral and a desk job in Tulwood. By this point some vice admirals, who would still be his superior, had less seniority than he did, and some believe he was forced out because of the friction between naval traditions governed by seniority and his relatively low rank - for instance, by tradition he was considered within his rights to deny these younger admirals the right to come aboard his ship, despite being a mere captain who had never taken part in a major fleet action. Officially, however, he simply chose to retire, with full pension and a number of bonuses for his accomplishments over the course of his career. However, instead of using that considerable wealth to fund a life of luxurious retirement, he bought two large merchant ships at auction and has been using his personal wealth and royalties from the series of novels celebrating his career to fund a series of expeditions into uncharted waters, seemingly determined to have personally visited every island and shore across the world before passing on.