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In October 1777, an English naval officer called Francis Reynolds-Moreton captained a warship called Augusta up the Delaware river to fight American revolutionaries, and try to open a way for supplies to be delivered to Philadelphia. It was a debacle: the ship was replulsed and blocked by obstacles; it ran aground on a falling tide; listing, it caught fire (no-one afterwards could quite agree why) and exploded, killing some of the crew. Reynolds escaped and returned to England, was given other commands and had some success before retiring to Gloucestershire and a seat in Parliament

Serving under Reynolds was a junior officer called Edward Edwards. He eventually captained a ship called the Pandora and was ordered to take it to the Pacific in 1790 to capture the Mutineers from the Bounty, which took place on Pitcairn island. At some point on his journey he stumbled across another island in the same range - really just a crater rim around a spent volcano that is now an azure lagoon.

Though it had been visited almost 200 years earlier by a Portuguese sailor, Edwards claimed it for Britain and called it Ducie island. Francis Reynolds-Moreton was titled '3rd Baron Ducie'. I wonder if Edwards did this to honour his former commander, or because he thought this barren piece of rock covered in bird guano, half a world from anywhere, was a good-enough memorial to the man who almost got him killed

The Ducie dynasty owned several family 'seats' in Gloucestershire, including what is now called Woodchester Park, but was called 'Springs Park' when they were there. Today, we discovered why: on the steep terrain with porous limestone rock and heavy clay soil, there are springs everywhere, meaning wet clay everywhere. Braving a lot of mud, we slipped and slid our way into the valley to see picturesque artificial lakes in the country house style - not quite an azure lagoon, but handsome enough on (finally) a sunny day. This pretty barn (labelled 'kennels' on the map) was on our way