Joseph L. O’Steen

Joseph Lewis O'Steen (1950-2012) was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He started life as the son of a commercial fisherman who first took him to sea at age four. Having spent his early youth on the shrimping grounds of St. Augustine, Cape Canaveral and Key West, Florida, he was abandonedat age eleven and was adopted by the O'Steens and settled into a life ashore, but his love of the sea never died. He visited the local docks talking to the fishermen almost every day. Joseph read every nautical book he could get his hands on and watched every movie about the sea, from pirates and age of sail to the modern stories of World War 2. His heroes were the great ships and the men who sailed them. Eventually the call of the sea was too strong and he ran away in his senior year of high school to join the U. S. Navy.

He spent two enlistments in the Navy working his way up to First Class Petty Officer and spent two cruises on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy that took him to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and Caribbean Sea. He visited ports steeped in nautical history in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Scotland, and Jamaica. When he returned home to St. Augustine, with his growing family, he found a changed and dwindling fishing industry with no need for an 27 year old man with family responsibilities and too long out of the business.

Joseph used his Navy training and went to work at the local aircraft factory and soon discovered a knack for writing. He never lost his love of the sea and sea stories reading so many, so fast that they could not be published fast enough. He would wait for months for the latest book to be published.

His wife persuaded him to write his own sea stories while waiting for Alexander Kent's Second to None to be published. He started writing as a naval officer at the Heart of Oaks role playing site on line, where he created Nathan (Nate) Beauchamp, a British Naval officer in 1803. Soon the role playing was not enough. Joseph researched British naval histories and started to write the Nathan Beauchamp series. The books appear to be an attempt to unite works about the Georgian Navy with swashbuckling pirate novels. The series was planned with eight titles but only two were published.