Description
I make absolutely no apologies for enthusing about this little story since it is without doubt one of the all-time yachting and nautical classics. Written in 1903 (the year of the Wright brothers first powered flight), at the time when sea-power measured supremacy, it had profound political results. Via the narrative it was a major factor in alerting Great Britain to the dangers of German invasion – until this time it was France that had always been regarded as Britain’s natural military threat. Also the concept of what became the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve was conceived and recommended in the story.
The action takes place during late summer and autumn off the sands to the east of the North Sea along that short stretch of German coastline. It concerns two young men – one a rather eccentric English yachtsman and the other a smart and (in modern terms) upwardly mobile Foreign Office civil servant. Together they discover and investigate a German plan to invade England from the protected inlets along a stretch of the German coastline, landing at the deserted marshes and low country of East Anglia.
Erskine Childers himself loved sailing about the Friesian coast where most of the action takes place, and the story is an absolute delight in it’s descriptions of the two yachtsmen managing their small craft amongst the tides and October storms in these very difficult waters.
The Irish author himself became the victim of politics and was shot dead during the Irish problems in the 1920’s.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.