Our trip began with a lot of baggage; sleeping bags, wash bags and one single step. We were on our way to the Golden Hinde; we walked for about half an hour through the city streets and across the Thames. When we got there we had to put on our costumes; you could be an officer, the highest rank, then it was a barber surgeon, then it was a gunner. I was a gunner, the stupidest of the stupid, but the bravest of the brave. Even the teachers had to dress up! We met the actors who were already on board. The first two who came down were sailor Jack and his apprentice Tom, but they had just come from the tavern and were very drunk! They gave some people nicknames, Imogen was squeaky and Lucy was ‘pixy' or ‘poxy'! The people who wore glasses were asked “where did you get those very expensive Chinese eye glasses?” When Cara was asked she said “from the Spanish” and when we heard the word Spanish we had to go“arrgh puh” and spit on the floor. When Amy was asked, Emily shouted out “spec savers” and we all started laughing!

We then had dinner. We drank apple juice out of our tankards and we ate on tin plates. We really had what they would have had in Tudor times, it was quite disgusting, but surprisingly some people actually liked it! Some people just ate it because they were really hungry. After we had eaten, we all sang ‘what shall we do with the drunken sailor'!

After dinner we went down to the gun deck and learnt about the gunner's job on board. We learnt how to load a minion, a smaller cannon, and fire, reload it, and fire again, in just two minutes. Lucy is quite small so she would have been the little boy who had to get the new supply of gun powder for the gun when they needed to reload it. He would have had to swing down a rope, grab a barrel full of gun powder, race back up the stairs and give it to the waiting men. They used this method so people would not bang into each other on the stairs. The little boy would have been called the powder monkey! We had a fake war against the Spanish and if you were touched on the head you were sent to the barber surgeons who would mend you and then you had to carry on fighting. We won in the end.

We got ready for bed and slept on the gun deck. We were sleeping on hard wooden planks, so it was very hard to get comfortable. Surprisingly, most of us slept very well, but some of us were kept awake by people snoring! It was almost like a symphony of snores!

Meriel, Year 5