A rollicking sea adventure, set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, this book follows the escapades of a young midshipman who enters the King's service with some ideas that run badly afoul of the standards of naval discipline!
Set in 1699 and framed around the Jacobite (supporters of the overthrown king, James II) conspiracies of the time, Lieutenant Cornelius Vanslyperken is the greedy and treacherous commander of a small vessel that hunts for smugglers in the English Channel. Snarleyyow is his "indestructible" dog.
Newton Forster is a troubled young man who survives impressment into the Navy, imprisonment in France, and a shipwreck in the West Indies before gaining a post on British East India Company vessel bound for Asia. Forster faces a thrill a chapter—murder, insanity, press gangs, prison, pirates, treachery, and romance.
William Seymour grows up on shipboard in the Royal Navy, after his father is hanged during the mutiny at the Nore (1797), and later, he is impressed into the crew of a daring smuggler. This amusing and exciting novel blends in the classic true tale of an English captain who deliberately lost his frigate on a lee shore, in order to wreck a French line-of-battle ship.