Captain Isaac Biddlecomb is a fictional character created by maritime writer/novelist James L. Nelson. He is a merchant captain whose smuggling occupation and later participation in the American Revolution has made him the pride of the American colonies. After the first version of By Force of Arms was written, the author planned to change his name to Nathaniel, but decided that Isaac was too deeply engrained into his character. Instead, he used that name for Biddlecomb's faithful boatswain, and later, for his own son.
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Character description
Biddlecomb is the twenty-nine to thirty-one-year-old captain of the American merchantman Judea, who, though native ability, rose from deckhand to captain in eleven years. He is described in The Maddest Idea (Book Two of the Revolution at Sea Saga) as "...not a man who stood out in a crowd; his height was an unremarkable five-foot ten inches, not fat though certainly not thin, [with] dark brown hair tied in a queue and hanging down just past his shoulders." Isaac Biddlecomb's mother Sarah died in childbirth in 1758, when Isaac was only twelve, leaving Isaac and his father John alone and grief-stricken. But John, a week later, decided to rejoin the group he had fought with during the French and Indian War, the Gorham's Rangers. He and young Isaac sailed aboard the Providence, where they met William Stanton. Isaac found that he loved the ship and being around sailors, but his happiness was soon cut short by the death of his father.
Isaac was taken in by Stanton after that. He soon became a sailor, beginning as a mere midshipman and ending up, sixteen years later, as the captain of the Judea, which was destroyed in the novel By Force of Arms by a British fleet, after which he serves a short period of time aboard the merchantman William B. Adams, until he is betrayed by their first mate and pressed into labour aboard the H.M.S. Icarus under a man he would soon know as his enemy: Lieutenant James Pendexter.
Family/relations
Biddlecomb was orphaned at age twelve, after which he was unofficially taken in by William Stanton, owner of the Providence. After many years together, Isaac fell in love with Stanton's daughter, Virginia Stanton. He writes her a cryptic letter in The Maddest Idea, professing his love for her, but he is really trying to get a secret message through to her father. In The Continental Risque he promises to marry her, and they are finally wed and have a newborn child in the end of the fourth Revolution at Sea book Lords of the Ocean. Ezra Rumstick is Isaac's best friend and always faithful first mate. He first appears in By Force of Arms when Isaac stumbles across him lighting a dummy dressed up like a British grenadier on fire. The two of them are pressed into labour together, an adventure that made them virtually inseparable.