The Wreck of the Isabella - Hardcover

Miller, David

3.5

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780850524567: The Wreck of the Isabella

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0850524563 ISBN 13: 9780850524567

Publisher: Leo Cooper, 1995

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Naval actions during the Napoleonic Wars continue to excite a wide readership in many countries, but virtually all those books relate the deeds of admirals and captains, and tell the stories of fleets rather than individual ships. This story is different because, not only is it absolutely true, but it concerns a group of ordinary men, women and children who found themselves involved in an episode which was quite out of the ordinary. It began when one ship was wrecked on the remote and (at that time) totally deserted Falkland Islands due to the incompetence of its drunken master. Then two ships came to the rescue of the castaways, one British and one American, a situation which was complicated by the outbreak of the War of 1812 between the two countries. The adventures that befell the people of those three ships contains a greater mix of high courage and base cowardice, honesty and skulduggery, good luck and misfortune, and surprising twists than any novelist would dare to include in one book. Their adventures included a mutiny, a ship condemned as unfit even to leave harbour being despatched over the roughest seas in the world to rescue the castaways, six men sailing a thousand miles in a seventeen-foot boat, and five men being abandoned on a deserted island and enduring for 534 days, all accompanied by the usual naval background of floggings and courts martial. Yet not only did nobody die in the Falkland Islands but they even left with one more than had arrived - an infant born to a British army captain's wife on the mud floor of a hut made of turf and delivered by the wife of an Irish convict and a Port Jackson prostitute. There were two heroes, one an American captain and the other a black American sailor, several villains, and many who fell somewhere in between. This story, full of action and unexpected turns, is one of the most exciting to come out of the period, not least because it describes life at the start of the nineteenth century as it really was.

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About the Author:

David Miller is the author of seventy books. He lives in the U.K.

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