British Naval

Book Three of the Nicholas Cruwys Naval Series This book continues the voyages and career of Nicholas Cruwys begun in Soundings Edge and Latitudes Edge. Preliminary peace negotiations have begun in Paris in January 1783 to formally end the global contest that began with the American war of independence, with the terms of peace hanging in the balance. Nicholas Cruwys finds himself temporarily outside naval service, commanding the East India Company ship Ganges on a mission that exists in the shadows between commerce and warfare. Ganges must intercept the heavily armed French merchant vessel ...

The first in an action-packed spy series introducing Lieutenant Dragan Kelly. It is 1942. HMS Visigoth has been torpedoed off the coast of German occupied Norway. Sole survivor Lieutenant Dragan Kelly finds himself behind enemy lines, unsure who to trust. The Norwegian resistance share rumours about a mysterious Nazi plant where an Armageddon weapon of terrifying power is under construction. Should Kelly escape to Russia or stay and investigate it? And what of the stunningly beautiful but enigmatic resistance fighter Sybilla? Kelly falls in love with her, but is she all she claims to be? ...

The H.M.S. Leopard pulled into the bay of Pulo Batang looking more like a shabby merchant ship that a man-of-war. The crew had endured a calamitous voyage plagued by gaol-fever, pursued by the Dutch Waakzaamheid, and struck by an iceberg. Suffice it to say, Jack Aubrey was ready for home.

No one is to be trusted and Donland is to use every trick available to him to succeed. The forces arrayed against him are powerful as well as influential. He must deceive and evade those who attempt to stop him from reaching a wreck on an island in the Indian Ocean. The Admiralty and The Honorable East India Company give him the authority to command any vessel he boards. He uses that authority no matter the objections of the captains of the merchantmen or the naval ships he boards. Having journey from the Mediterranean, across Egyptian deserts then marooned on an island, he finds himself ...

Patrick O'Brian transports you to the high seas of the Napoleonic era when the French demagogue is making a desperate attempt to control the European world. While Napoleon pursues the British across Europe, rumors fly about him forging a secret link with the forces of Islam. Soon an ominous horde of Muslim mercenaries gather.

To Rule the Waves tells the extraordinary story of how the British Royal Navy allowed one nation to rise to a level of power unprecedented in history. From the navy's beginnings under Henry VIII to the age of computer warfare and special ops, historian Arthur Herman tells the spellbinding tale of great battles at sea, heroic sailors, violent conflict, and personal tragedy - of the way one mighty institution forged a nation, an empire, and a new world.

'Paints a vivid picture of life aboard the mighty ship-of-the-line' - Daily Express 1811. The Adriatic, the 'French Lake', is now the most valuable territory Napoleon Bonaparte possesses. Captain Sir Thomas Kydd finds his glorious return to England cut short when the Admiralty summons him to...

In the year 1794, an East Indiaman is taken in the Strait of Sunda by French warships that knew her name, and knew exactly where to wait. The war of the French Revolution has reached the farthest ocean. Fresh from the Glorious First of June, Captain Nicholas Cruwys of the Royal Navy and the frigate Topaze are ordered east — to waters he last sailed as a young officer bound for Canton, a decade and a war ago. The harbours are the ones he remembers. Nothing else is. For this is the Company's ocean now: the East India Company, a power greater than most kingdoms, with its own armies, its own ...

THE NICHOLAS CRUWYS NAVAL SERIES: BOOKS 1–3 Soundings Edge · Latitudes Edge · Longitudes Edge Three complete novels following Nicholas Cruwys from a fourteen-year-old gentleman volunteer in 1774 to a seasoned commander in the far waters of the China trade — for readers of Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester. SOUNDINGS EDGE In the spring of 1774, Nicholas Cruwys leaves the stone halls of Exeter and the ancestral pride of a faded Devonshire line to join His Majesty's Navy — a world where the rigid structures of Georgian society meet the harsh meritocracy of wooden ships and iron ...

As we begin The Whole Wide World, the fifth novel in the Rian and Mouse series, Captain Alois Bumper has officially become the commodore of his own line, The Blue Water Packet and Navigation Co., after he buys a second ship as a running mate to Cleo. This causes what Tom and Bumper call “happy problems,” as their first course of action is to spruce up the new vessel and then fill any remaining crew berths in the ships. Mouse has been promoted to First Mate aboard the new packet, business is good at The Two Barrels, and Sofus and his new ‘Da’ have settled in together quite famously. ...

PELLEW: FLEET ACTION Midshipman Gerry Pellew escaped a French prison with nothing but the clothes on his back and a debt to the men who didn't make it out. Now, aboard HMS Lark, he's determined to become the officer his late father would have been proud of — if the war doesn't take him first. The blockade off Brest is a slow grind of fog, storms, and waiting — until Lark crosses paths with the Junon, a French frigate captained by a man as skilled and honorable as any Gerry has faced. Twice they meet, first in the fog and then in a squall. The third time, there will be nowhere left to ...

For more than twenty years, HMS Hood was the most famous warship in Britain. She was the Mighty Hood, flagship, imperial showpiece and visible symbol of the Royal Navy's power. Then, on the morning of 24 May 1941, she entered battle against the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait. Within minutes, Hood was gone. Of the 1,418 men aboard, only three survived. HMS Hood: The Pride of the Royal Navy and the Battle That Shocked an Empire traces the extraordinary story behind one of the most devastating losses in British naval history. Gordon J. MacKenzie follows Hood from the ...

Life has dealt him an unfair hand, leaving him with few options. Will a chance encounter with a caring American colonial family provide a poor English boy with a stable home, or will the boy be lost in events that are spiraling out of control? Peter Smith, a boy of humble beginnings, is a testament to the human spirit. Despite his impoverished upbringing, abduction, and mistreatment, he refuses to be defined by his circumstances. Born into poverty and hopelessness on the streets of Portsmouth, England, Peter is forced into a life of crime just to survive. His resilience is tested when he is...

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 Monarch: 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...

Brent knows the price of deception: death. Yet, after enduring the horrors of Muslim pirate captivity and the brutal life of a galley slave, impersonating a dead midshipman is his only path to survival—and a life beyond the nightmares. Rescued by a British man-of-war, Brent must navigate a treacherous sea of lies and doubt, convincing a skeptical world of his stolen identity. His dream of becoming a naval officer hinges on an audacious rescue mission. Brent is the only one who knows the secret entrance to the very pit that haunts his sleep. Can he lead the charge to save four vital men, ...

Donland’s Squadron England is not yet at war with France in 1803. Post Captain Isaac Donland has been given a new command — the sixty-four gun Excellent, laid up in ordinary at Spithead — and orders that tell him very little of what he is sailing toward. France and Spain are building something on the Isthmus of Panama. The Admiralty needs to know what it is, how advanced it is, and whether it can be stopped. With a squadron of four ships and a Royal Engineer named Colonel Stoddard aboard, Donland sails south and west into waters that are growing more dangerous by the week. There are ...

Pellew: Boarders Away Gerald Pellew is fourteen years old, the son of a dead admiral, and newly turned over to the Ardent when she sails straight into a trap off Ushant. Out-gunned by the combined fleets of France and Spain, the ship strikes her colours, and Gerry is marched into a French prison to rot. What follows is hunger, fever, and the slow dying of the men around him, but a boy who has been well taught does not lie down. When a winter storm tears open the prison wall, Gerry and a small powder-boy slip into the flooded river with nothing but a hidden coat and a promise to keep. They ...

When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics, but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often-described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. 

At the opening of his third novel in an ongoing adventure series by Patrick O'Brian, Jack Aubrey is cruising off Cape Sicie when his friend Stephen Maturin (more serenely situated in Sussex) is informed of the Board's decision regarding Aubrey's prize money, taken after victorious engagement with a Spanish squadron at Cape Santa Maria. The money, five million pieces of eight, is not, as is the custom of war, to be divided among the crews of the four victorious vessels.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE VANISHED INVENTOR A Sherlock Holmes Mystery — by Mark Collins On the eve of the greatest triumph of his career, brilliant engineer Cedric Marlowe vanishes without a trace — from a workshop locked from within. Greenwich, 1895. Tomorrow, Cedric Marlowe is to demonstrate his revolutionary naval invention — the Marlowe Regulator — before the Lords of the Admiralty, a device that promises to render Britain's warships faster, quieter, and utterly without rival on the high seas. Tonight, he disappears. His workshop door is locked from the inside. His supper sits half-...