IN HARM’S WAY
The year is 1802. The peace is a rumor. The sea is a killing ground.
Captain Robert Harrison sails from Portsmouth in the thirty-two gun frigate H.M.S. Falcon with orders that are simple and merciless. Report to the Leeward Islands Station. Patrol from Cayenne to Trinidad. Destroy all enemy shipping bearing French or Spanish colors, naval vessels and merchantmen alike.
What follows is sixty days on the most dangerous coast in the Atlantic world.
The coast of the Spanish Main offers no mercy and asks for none. Fever takes men without warning and without remedy. The rivers are treacherous. The forest hides those who wish to remain hidden and kills those who do not respect it. The seas between the islands are the hunting ground of French frigates and Spanish men of war who know these waters as Falcon's crew does not.
Harrison is a captain of long experience and hard judgement. His first lieutenant Wainwright is steady and capable and prepared to speak when speaking is necessary. His officers are young and untested and will be tested severely before the patrol is over. His men are a crew that must become a crew in the weeks of the passage south and the harder weeks of the patrol itself.
They will fight two French sloops of war in a noon action of ferocious intensity. They will burn an enemy brig and drive a French frigate onto the rocks of her own anchorage. They will take prizes and lose men and bury shipmates at sea in the indifferent blue water of the Caribbean. They will fight a night action against a heavy French frigate that comes out of the darkness without warning. They will navigate the narrow and treacherous Columbus Channel and look into the Gulf of Paria at a Spanish ship of the line riding at anchor off Port of Spain.
And through it the entire coast will take its toll. Men will die of fever in the heat of the lower deck. Men will die of wounds on a surgeon's table in a ship that smells of blood and bilge water and burning powder. A midshipman fifteen years old will take a native spear in his side retreating to the boats on a river in Guiana and will refuse to die because the ship needs him.
H.M.S. Falcon is a novel of the age of fighting sail written in the plain hard language of the sea. No sentiment. No quarter.
Genre: Thriller
The year is 1802. The peace is a rumor. The sea is a killing ground.
Captain Robert Harrison sails from Portsmouth in the thirty-two gun frigate H.M.S. Falcon with orders that are simple and merciless. Report to the Leeward Islands Station. Patrol from Cayenne to Trinidad. Destroy all enemy shipping bearing French or Spanish colors, naval vessels and merchantmen alike.
What follows is sixty days on the most dangerous coast in the Atlantic world.
The coast of the Spanish Main offers no mercy and asks for none. Fever takes men without warning and without remedy. The rivers are treacherous. The forest hides those who wish to remain hidden and kills those who do not respect it. The seas between the islands are the hunting ground of French frigates and Spanish men of war who know these waters as Falcon's crew does not.
Harrison is a captain of long experience and hard judgement. His first lieutenant Wainwright is steady and capable and prepared to speak when speaking is necessary. His officers are young and untested and will be tested severely before the patrol is over. His men are a crew that must become a crew in the weeks of the passage south and the harder weeks of the patrol itself.
They will fight two French sloops of war in a noon action of ferocious intensity. They will burn an enemy brig and drive a French frigate onto the rocks of her own anchorage. They will take prizes and lose men and bury shipmates at sea in the indifferent blue water of the Caribbean. They will fight a night action against a heavy French frigate that comes out of the darkness without warning. They will navigate the narrow and treacherous Columbus Channel and look into the Gulf of Paria at a Spanish ship of the line riding at anchor off Port of Spain.
And through it the entire coast will take its toll. Men will die of fever in the heat of the lower deck. Men will die of wounds on a surgeon's table in a ship that smells of blood and bilge water and burning powder. A midshipman fifteen years old will take a native spear in his side retreating to the boats on a river in Guiana and will refuse to die because the ship needs him.
H.M.S. Falcon is a novel of the age of fighting sail written in the plain hard language of the sea. No sentiment. No quarter.
Genre: Thriller
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