Before The Wind
August, 1792. England has declared war on the French Republic, and Captain James Pike has at last been given the ship he has waited half his career to command — Valiant, a twenty-eight gun frigate fresh from Plymouth yard. Off the coast of Spain, with orders to scout for Commodore Whitcombe's squadron, Pike sights three sail running south under no colours. Two French frigates and a brig — and the brig, when at last she is taken, will prove to be carrying half a million gold louis bound for Toulon to buy the silence of half the Mediterranean.
But the gold is only the beginning. Pike's first lieutenant Amos Hammersham, heir to a barony, frowns on a captain whose father was a Hampshire farmer, and the wardroom is a colder place than the quarterdeck. Pike's second, the steady big-boned Lieutenant Carter Finley, must learn to step into a first's berth in the middle of a hard cruise. Midshipman Tarling, fifteen years old, is given a brig of his own. And out of Whitcombe's sealed orders comes a service Pike was not expecting — to convey three gentlemen of false names to a private wharf at Livorno, to wait off the Tuscan coast, and to bring back what comes out of the dark.
A French forty-gun frigate at anchor off Livorno. A storm rising from the south-west. A captain of the old French navy with his wife in Valiant's sleeping cabin, and the seventy-four Foudroyant promised to England on the seventh of October. From a raking broadside off Cape Trafalgar to a turn at one cable in heavy weather off Sardinia, Pike must fight, run, and hold the trust of officers who do not yet know whether they trust him — with the verdict of the Admiralty waiting at Gibraltar and Lord Hood himself in the great cabin of Victory.
The opening volume of a new series in the great tradition of Royal Navy fiction. Sixteen chapters of broadside, blockade, and the long careful work of a captain learning his trade in the first months of a twenty-two year war.
Genre: Thriller
August, 1792. England has declared war on the French Republic, and Captain James Pike has at last been given the ship he has waited half his career to command — Valiant, a twenty-eight gun frigate fresh from Plymouth yard. Off the coast of Spain, with orders to scout for Commodore Whitcombe's squadron, Pike sights three sail running south under no colours. Two French frigates and a brig — and the brig, when at last she is taken, will prove to be carrying half a million gold louis bound for Toulon to buy the silence of half the Mediterranean.
But the gold is only the beginning. Pike's first lieutenant Amos Hammersham, heir to a barony, frowns on a captain whose father was a Hampshire farmer, and the wardroom is a colder place than the quarterdeck. Pike's second, the steady big-boned Lieutenant Carter Finley, must learn to step into a first's berth in the middle of a hard cruise. Midshipman Tarling, fifteen years old, is given a brig of his own. And out of Whitcombe's sealed orders comes a service Pike was not expecting — to convey three gentlemen of false names to a private wharf at Livorno, to wait off the Tuscan coast, and to bring back what comes out of the dark.
A French forty-gun frigate at anchor off Livorno. A storm rising from the south-west. A captain of the old French navy with his wife in Valiant's sleeping cabin, and the seventy-four Foudroyant promised to England on the seventh of October. From a raking broadside off Cape Trafalgar to a turn at one cable in heavy weather off Sardinia, Pike must fight, run, and hold the trust of officers who do not yet know whether they trust him — with the verdict of the Admiralty waiting at Gibraltar and Lord Hood himself in the great cabin of Victory.
The opening volume of a new series in the great tradition of Royal Navy fiction. Sixteen chapters of broadside, blockade, and the long careful work of a captain learning his trade in the first months of a twenty-two year war.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Perry Comer's Before the Wind