An Atlantic Adventure: Book Seven of the Chronicles of Adam Black the Teenage Time Traveller

By Raff Stuart

In this the seventh book in the chronicles of Adam Black, Adam is larking about with his mates in Anglesey when he finds himself back in about 150 BC in a Celtic village. From his capture and enslavement until his eventual return to his own time he has a roller-coaster ride crossing Ireland as well as being on one of the first Atlantic crossings to the Azores and on to a new and exciting land.

Other Books in the series:
Book 1 A Roman Odyssey
Book 2 A Viking Voyage
Book 3 A Nazi Nightmare
Book 4 A Voyage to Victory
Book 5 A Cavalier Canter
Book 6 An Egyptian Escapade
Book 8 Fast Forward to a New Beginning

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781481791281

Raff Stuart

The Author, Raff Stuart, grew up in the same time as Adam and many of the things that happened to Adam impacted on him as well. He spent 31 years in the Army joining at the age of fifteen and leaving as a senior Major to take up a career in the commercial and public sectors as a CEO and management consultant. He is married with two grown up children and lives in Aberdeen.

Book preview

Chapter 1 A Walk on the Wild Side

Adam was sweating in the summer sunshine despite the breeze and he was beginning to regret having joined his mates in this ramble across country to the supposed prehistoric site. They had covered about four miles from the Army camp on Ynys Gaint Island close to the foot of the Menai Bridge that morning passing through both the villages at Menai Bridge and Llanfair. Having left the main road they had followed a minor road up to the entrance to the site. From what was said on the information board the site’s name of Bryn Celli Ddu means ‘the mound in the grove of the deity’. Sounds a bit spooky! Andy said as he, Adam and Geordie advanced on the burial mound or ‘passage grave’.

While Adam was happy to have escaped from the confines of the camp on this their rest day he had no real wish to go down into the dark passageway for he couldn’t quite put to bed the memories of the passages that had led him into trouble in the past in Roman and Nazi time. However, he had been in a good many passages when potholing in Cheshire so he quickly caught up with them, after all he was a Lance Corporal now not a private like the other two. There was the strong smell of fox as they came up to the entrance. Adam hesitated for a moment taking in the stone lined passageway that was currently illuminated by the sun riding high above them before leading the way into the grave and a lot of trouble.

He had only been a few yards in front of them and had moved some twenty feet into the darkness towards a glimmering light at the end of the passage when he felt the familiar surge. At first he had thought that he was mistaken as little seemed to have changed. He could still hear movement behind him but then he realised that the light ahead of was far larger and brighter than it had been. As he reach the end of the passageway he knew the truth for just ahead of him stood a near naked man with lank hair hanging down to his shoulders and a heavy growth of facial hair. The man stood dumbstruck, as he took in Adam in his hiking boots, jeans and T shirt. Adam could sense that those that had been behind him had closed in on him and were certainly not Andy and Geordie. He took a quick glimpse backwards and as he thought there were two large broad shouldered individuals immediately behind him.

The immediate shock that had suspended all noise and movement ended with a high-pitched steam of words from the man ahead of him none of which Adam understood. They didn’t sound like any Welsh words he had heard spoken by people of North Wales in his time he thought and his shoulders sagged. I am in the mire again! he muttered as he waited for the uproar to end. He was grabbed from behind and pushed out into the open space that in his time would be a small chamber with a prehistoric standing stone within it that went back some 20,000 years or at least the original one had been. The original stone was there in all its glory in this time and Adam only wished he knew what period he was in. Not that it really made much difference to him for it wouldn’t help him make that short journey back up the corridor to his own time.

The man to his front was still shouting but whether it was at Adam or to someone on the mound above Adam couldn’t see. The men behind him pushed Adam further into the space that would be the chamber until he was within arm’s length of the man who was now clutching some form of spade tightly in both hands. Adam feared that this might be the end of him but then above him came another voice and Adam looked up into the eyes of a very different man to the one before him. He stood out from the others crowding round the lip of the mound that was being constructed in that he was clothed in a way very similar to the Celtic traders he had known in Bertha and Carpow back in Roman time the main difference being that he had a great deal of jewellery around his neck with silver bracelets on his wrists. Obviously the big chief! Adam thought and bowed as best he could with his arms being tightly held by the men now standing on either side of him.

There was now silence and the Chief spoke again directly at Adam. Now what? Adam thought as fought back through his memory to see if he could remember any Celtic words and phrases from Roman Time, which he had left some five years previously. He nodded again and said a few words that he remembered from his time with Dondi but it was clear that the Chief didn’t understand him so he tried again this time in Latin. Again the Chief looked at him blankly so in desperation he spoke in Old Norse. The Chief threw up his hands and said something to his fellow tribesmen who laughed. Adam was wondering whether he should consider using French, German or even English when the Chief gave a command and Adam was manhandled over to the edge of the open space where the bank sloped slightly and he was pushed and pulled up onto the mound so any chance of an immediate escape was dashed.

Adam was taken off the mound and he and everyone else moved down onto the open ground on the other side of the ditch. The Chief and his entourage turned and faced Adam as he was held between two tribesmen. The Chief poked and prodded at Adam touching his clothes and looking at his hair and all the while chattering away to his henchmen and shaking his head. From time to time he would stop and stare into Adam’s eyes and ask him questions. Of course Adam could only shrug for he could not recognise a single word. This is going to be tough! Adam thought for he could see the frustration in the eyes of the Chief.

The Chief eventually threw up his hands and giving the two men holding Adam a command stalked away. Adam now found himself dragged off to a building that was very similar to the roundhouses that had made up the village next to the Roman fort at Carpow only perhaps a little smaller reminding Adam of some of the huts he had seen in a movie about an American big-game hunter on safari in Kenya. As always seemed to happen in his time travelling adventures he found himself incarcerated in the hut with one of the tribesmen guarding the door. He did think briefly of digging his way out of the back of the hut but knew that anyone in or about the huts that were only feet away would see him if he tried to escape. So he hunkered down and thought about what had brought to this place and his future should he not be able to get back to his time.

Chapter 2 A Time of Mountains and Sea

This had been his last year as a member of the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion and a very busy one it was. As a lance corporal he had the added responsibility of ensuring that all the individuals within the barrack room were doing all their normal tasks of polishing the floor and cleaning the corridors and ablutions in the their section of the barrack block for the room’s corporal would always delegate such tasks to Adam. The year was also crammed full of training exercises and adventure training that tested everyone to their limits.

Adam’s term reports that his mother had received showed that his superiors felt that he was enthusiastic and would soon win promotion as an adult soldier. He had won prizes as he passed the subjects in his Army Certificate of Education at Junior, Intermediate and Senior level and he had more As and Bs than Cs. In fact it was only his physique that caused concern as he was underweight and his upper torso was not strong so that push-ups, heaves to the beam, and body curls always let him down. Having been promoted to Lance Corporal after a year and he had taken up weight training to strengthen his arms not that it had made that much of a difference. He thought that it was perhaps his shyness that held him back from fully exploiting his situation as he moved through his time at the IJLB. Just after Easter in that year of 1963 he had attended an Army Outward Bound Course at a camp near the village of Aberdyfi near Tywyn on the Welsh coast.

This was considered a prestigious course to attend as only a few were chosen from IJLB to join the juniors leaders from other junior leader battalions as well as adults but he always had performed well in this area and had the red stars to prove it. It lasted for two weeks and was the second toughest physical period in his young life. Almost as soon as they arrived they started with a five mile run in PT vest, denim trousers, ammunition boots and a number of 25 pounder shells filled with sand and weighing a great amount when being carried close to one’s chest. They would run, or double-march, in a column of three files for mile after mile passing the shells between them. Of course they were used to running and walking for ten miles in full kit and rifles in less than 1 hour 40 minutes to pass their Combat Fitness Test (CFT) but this was totally different.

By the time they eventually got back to the camp Adam’s back and shoulders were rigid and they were all exhausted. Getting off his bed the next morning was agony but there was no respite for at 6.30am each morning they were rousted out of bed quickly donning swimming trunks and then they were off at a gallop over the dunes and down to the freezing Irish Sea. Needless to say it was a short energetic swim before they continued their run along the seashore and back over the dunes to a hot shower and breakfast before the day really began. They had all sorts of entertaining events to complete including one of the most hair-raising assault courses it had ever been Adam’s pleasure to complete.

Most of the obstacles were some 20 to 30 feet off the ground and had to be covered at speed where one team was competing against another. There were ten soldiers in their team and Adam was the smallest and youngest among the six junior soldiers, with the three adult soldiers and one marine being older and taller than them all. The ten little nigger boys was eventually the name they called themselves as they kept losing team members in a series of accidents. The most spectacular one happened on the assault course. The lad involved was just ahead of Adam. As they approached the beginning of the rope-works they had to grab a short length of rope with a toggle at each end then scale the web of ropes up to the rope bridge and then cross over it to a raised wooden platform that held a thick rope hawser that stretched down to a wooden tripod some 100 yards away. The idea was that you threw the rope over the hawser, held the rope on either side just above the toggle and swung out into the void down the death-slide as it was called.

It has been raining overnight and the pile of ropes and toggles were now lying in a puddle of muddle water. Unfortunately his colleague had ended up with a muddy one and as he swung out from the platform his hands slipped off the rope and he dropped like a stone to thud down on the ground 30 feet below. By that time Adam was there ready to swing out. He hesitated but was driven on by the permanent staff sergeant in charge of their team. A medic was at the lad’s side and in no time at all he was whipped away to the military hospital a few miles up the road. Over the next few days they lost another two team members to injury. This was hardly surprising when one considers the activities they were doing each day: Rock climbing at a very difficult standard, including overhangs, sea canoeing in the high waves and the raging surf of those early spring days.

Occasionally the team would be split in two and facing each other they would pick up a telegraph pole hoist it in up into their chests before throwing it across to their colleagues across the gap or raise it on to their shoulders and hoist it above their heads to place it on their other shoulder. The best bit was running up to the top of the nearby hill and down again with the log on their shoulders, some three miles. All good fun! Of course the climax to the course was the final exercise when they spent some four days map reading and climbing over the mountains in the Snowdonia national park. Each member of the team took it in turns to lead the team and map read. Often there was a heavy fog or mist obscuring the mountains and they had to send someone out on the compass bearing to the limit of their vision, walk up to him and then start the whole process over again.

On the afternoon of the second last day Adam was leading the team. They had had a good day up until then and were now heading down the steep mountainside to the valley where their campsite lay. They were following a stream down over the boulder-strewn slope. Adam leapt down from one such boulder down on to the small boulders at the side of the stream but they were slick with slime and his foot slipped and he went down heavily on his right knee before tumbling over and over down the hill the large heavy rucksack on his back giving impetus to his downwards descent. His colleagues dropped their rucksacks and raced after him to stop his decent. When Adam finally came to rest he had an excruciating pain in his knee, which had already begun to swell. Adam continued to lead the team down to the valley below in heavy rain hobbling along.

After making their evening meal they fell thankfully into sleeping bags. They had been taught to bring their wet clothes into their sleeping bag in the vain hope that they might dry, which of course they didn’t. All that happened was that Adam was kept awake with the pain in his knee and his feet in soggy clothing. By the time they rose early the next morning his knee had swollen to a point where he couldn’t move it. He struggled into his clothes but even a pace or two was absolute agony so the instructors quickly took the decision to call an army ambulance and he was quickly whisked off to the same military hospital that his other three colleagues had gone to.

The best laugh was when the consultant came in on his rounds and announced to the world at large that this was the best case of Housemaid’s Knee he’d seen in ages. Adam was shocked and had thought, Housemaid’s knee why could it not have been Mountaineer’s Knee or something equally heroic? What came next was hardly a laughing matter. They came with a huge syringe, which had a large diameter needle to draw the fluid off his knee. It was a week or so before Adam was released back to IJLB in Oswestry, frustrated at not being able to complete the last day of his course for he had being doing well up until then. Of course the injury had weakened him and he had no sooner recovered from the injury than he succumbed to an illness. So between the course injury and sickness he lost a lot of training time and was playing catch-up for the rest of the term.

Having completed the spring term those in their final year had joined up with the rest of the company to go on the summer camp under the shadow of the Menai Bridge. The company’s time up until the point when he and his mates had decided to take a trip up to the ruins had been active and challenging but thoroughly enjoyable with rambles up the nearby mountains and canoeing along the Menai straits but what Adam was now faced with was enough to chill his heart for he couldn’t really see any way he could get out of the mess he now found himself in. Even if he was able to escape how could he get back into the passage grave that the tribesmen were now creating? What was even worse was that Anglesey was the isle of the druids and apparently they made sacrifices of their captured prisoners. Did he fall into that category he wondered?

Chapter 3 A Druid arrives!

The hours dragged by and Adam’s spirits fell lower and lower as his mind went over and over the stories he had heard of the druids and the warriors of this period. Not that he actually knew what period he was actually in. He tried to consider what he had seen and compare it against what he could remember of his time with Dondi and Camma’s family in their farm back in Roman Time. Of course the fact that they were continually trading with the Romans in Bertha could possibly have changed their way of life for they had looked nothing like the tribesmen from the North who had attacked them and chased Adam for his life.

Adam’s mind went back to what he had read in the blurb on the notice board as they had entered the site. It had stated that the burial mound and the changes made to it had been done a good many years before the Roman invasion of the island back in 50

Reviews for An Atlantic Adventure

[raffstuart · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This tale brings into question who actual discovered the New World and underlines the feats of the Carthaginians and their forefathers more than two thousand years ago. It makes you want to read the historical background of this book.