April 1778. England is at war, and the Navy wants boys.
Gerry Pellew is twelve years old, raised soft in Bath, and terrified. His father, the legendary Admiral Lord Pellew, has one instruction for the captain of the seventy-four-gun *Alexander*: train him, and show him no slackness. His brother has one piece of advice: never show your feelings, and for God's sake do not cry.
The sea will test both within the year.
From the smoke and slaughter of Ushant, where Gerry must perform a last terrible kindness for his dearest friend, to lee shores and fevers, fog duels and night boardings, the youngest midshipman in the ship learns his trade the only way the sea teaches it. By thirteen he has stood his watch through gales that kill, taken a prize crew's parole, and brought a captured brig home through an enemy-haunted Channel as the most irregular prize-master in the fleet.
Then the great Combined Fleet of France and Spain enters the Channel, sixty-six sail of the line against England's thirty-eight, and the beacons burn along the coast of Cornwall. And far away in Bath, in a curtained room, a dying admiral follows his son's war on a chart spread across his counterpane, waiting for one last letter, while the boy at sea obeys the hardest order of his life.
*An admiral's son comes home with his ship.*
A story of friendship and loss, duty and devotion, and the words a father and son could only ever say between the lines.
Genre: Thriller
Gerry Pellew is twelve years old, raised soft in Bath, and terrified. His father, the legendary Admiral Lord Pellew, has one instruction for the captain of the seventy-four-gun *Alexander*: train him, and show him no slackness. His brother has one piece of advice: never show your feelings, and for God's sake do not cry.
The sea will test both within the year.
From the smoke and slaughter of Ushant, where Gerry must perform a last terrible kindness for his dearest friend, to lee shores and fevers, fog duels and night boardings, the youngest midshipman in the ship learns his trade the only way the sea teaches it. By thirteen he has stood his watch through gales that kill, taken a prize crew's parole, and brought a captured brig home through an enemy-haunted Channel as the most irregular prize-master in the fleet.
Then the great Combined Fleet of France and Spain enters the Channel, sixty-six sail of the line against England's thirty-eight, and the beacons burn along the coast of Cornwall. And far away in Bath, in a curtained room, a dying admiral follows his son's war on a chart spread across his counterpane, waiting for one last letter, while the boy at sea obeys the hardest order of his life.
*An admiral's son comes home with his ship.*
A story of friendship and loss, duty and devotion, and the words a father and son could only ever say between the lines.
Genre: Thriller
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Used availability for Perry Comer's Pellew: So It Begins