Their Lordships Request: A Harry Heron Adventure, by Patrick G. Cox. AuthorHouse, 266 pages, softcover, $18.00.

Authors of nautical fiction never seem to tire of the Napoleonic Wars, continuously mining the conflict between France and Great Britain for new characters and ideas. South African writer Patrick G. Cox has opened a fresh series in the genre with the story of a teenage Midshipman Harry Nelson-Heron, the son of minor Irish gentry, who is transferred to the new 74-gun HMS Spartan with his boyhood friend, Ferghal O’Connor. Great Britain and France have just signed the Peace of Amiens, which amounted to little more than a truce between the European superpowers of the day.

Harry and his friend, along with the other Spartans, are assigned to guard a convoy of prison ships bound for New South Wales, Australia, with a cargo of people sentenced to exile Down Under. Along the way, Harry encounters the expected adventures, including a fleet of slavers off the coast of Africa. Cox is at his best as Harry goes into battle with pirates, which attack one of the prison ships with a xebec, a ship with two means of propulsion: lateen sails and oars. Cox has mastered the culture and language of the period in both description and dialog. The final moments of the xebec skirmish are truly exciting, ending with an image that reminds the reader of the horrible fate of slaves on the losing side.

Cox’s historical tale is fairly conventional with themes readers expect from coming of age stories. However, Cox weaves an interesting, but separate thread into this novel, a parallel story of the launching of a large spacecraft in orbit above Mars. The year is 2202, and the warship Vanguard is fitting out for its first assignment under the command of Captain James O’Niall Heron. Though the surnames are the same, and the “nautical” feel of the shipboard culture is similar to its Napoleonic mirror, the relationship between the two Herons isn’t clear. That said, the progress of the story implies that each will have something to teach the other.

With his parallel stories, Cox is attempting to breathe new life into an old genre, and Their Lordships Request ends with a promise that the two threads will converge into one, creating the exciting possibility of something original. The next two books in the series—Out of Time and The Enemy is Within—are definitely on my reading list.

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Watch an interview with Patrick Cox about the family inspiration for his character Harry Heron.

Download Bet: Stowaway Daughter now for just $2.99. Great story for teens!

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Lisbet “Bet” Lindstrom is the 13-year-old daughter of a sea captain convicted of theft and sent to prison. Bet is convinced her father is innocent, but she has no way to prove it. Desperate to free her father, she visits his old fishing boat, and spots a horribly scarred sailor who might know the truth about the crime. Ignoring the warnings of her friends, she secretly jumps aboard the ship and sails to Alaska. She braves huge storms, performs daring rescues, and faces the man who threatens everything she loves.

The portrayal of Bet and her love for her father...pulled me along until the exciting last pages. — Barbara Sjoholm

About the Author — Joe Follansbee is the author of six books, including Shipbuilders, Sea Captains and Fishermen: The Story of the Schooner Wawona, and The Fyddeye Guide to America’s Maritime History. Bet: Stowaway Daughter is his first novel. He lives in Seattle.

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Read an interview with the author about ebooks, editing, and the future of independent publishing at The Editor's POV.

Tillamook Passage: Far Side of the Pacific, by Brian D. Ratty. Published by AuthorHouse, 331 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

Native Americans rarely take center stage in historical fiction with strong maritime themes, but Tillamook Passage: The Far Side of the Pacific is an exception. And the author, Brian Ratty, adds an even rarer element, the unique native cultures of the Pacific Northwest coast, which have deep sea traditions and technology that still amaze modern mariners. Tillamook Passage explores this history more deeply than almost any historical novel for young adults in recent years.

Ratty starts with one of the least known, but most important sea voyages in American  history. In 1788, the sloop Lady Washington and the full-rigged ship Columbia Rediviva set out from Boston on a trading expedition. Captain Robert Gray aimed to become the first American seafarer to trade for furs on the Northwest Coast and sail west for Hong Kong and back to Boston. He would become one of the first Americans to circumnavigate the globe.

Enter a fictional crewman, Joseph Blackwell, a Boston teenager anxious to strike out on his own. But he gets more than he bargained for when he is marooned at Tillamook Bay on the coast of what would be known later as Oregon. With him is Marcus Lopez, a character based on a real crewman aboard Lady Washington who was killed in a skirmish with the Tillamook tribe in 1788. But what if Lopez and the fictional Blackwell survived the fight and were left for dead by Lady Washington? From this point, Ratty speculates how Blackwell and Lopez adapt and eventually thrive in an alien culture.

Ratty’s story is full of rich descriptions of life aboard ship and particularly life among the native peoples of Oregon. By having Blackwell adapt western sailing technology to indigenous sea-going canoes, Ratty shows how a single individual can have a dramatic impact on an entire culture. And by having Blackwell trade with people from the Smith River just south of the Oregon border to the mouth of the Columbia River, Ratty surveys the global political situation as Spain, Great Britain, Russia, and the U.S. compete for the riches of the Northwest. Tillamook Passage is a grand tour of the Oregon Coast before America understood its boundless possibilities.

Watch the video trailer for Tillamook Passage: Far Side of the Pacific

Conquest, by Julian Stockwin. U.S. release date: October 2011. Published in the U.S. by McBooks Press, 320 pages, hardcover, $24.00.

Dramatic retellings of the struggle between Great Britain and France under Napoleon often end with Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, as if everything naval in the Napoleonic Wars that happened after the great battle was hardly more than a long epilog. But as author Julian Stockwin and many historians see it, the battle opened the gates to a worldwide empire, and in Conquest, Stockwin puts his hero, Capt. Thomas Kydd, at the spearhead.

Kydd, his best friend Nicholas Renzi, and the crew of the frigate L’Aurore join an historic 1806 British expedition to seize the Dutch colony of Cape Town, near the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch—under the thumb of the French—send out a force of local militia and mercenaries to meet British regulars at a place called Blaauwberg, where the Dutch are defeated by the redcoats. The British (with Kydd along as a naval observer in Stockwin’s story) conquer Cape Town with hardly a shot fired, and the century-plus history of British domination of the region begins.

Stockwin treats the story of the British conquest of Cape Town, at least from Kydd’s point of view, as Britain’s opening move in the European race to empire. In reality, it was just one stop in a long march toward European, particularly British, domination of Africa and beyond. The characters express the common hypocrisy of conquerors; they were serving a higher purpose (their country’s safety) in taking by force what wasn’t theirs. What’s more striking is the Dutch burghers’ almost complete acceptance of their fate; as Stockwin interprets it, flying the Union Jack was good for business. Furthermore, the decision-makers see themselves as wise, just, and merciful, never mind they just killed more than 350 defenders at Blaauwberg. Apparently, these unfortunate souls got in the way of what Americans would later call “manifest destiny.”

Stockwin invents an engaging, well-paced adventure which pits Renzi against a mysterious and beautiful French noblewoman. But the author misses a better storytelling opportunity that could have balanced a somewhat lopsided narrative. We hear almost nothing directly in Conquest from the true-life antagonist in this incident, Jan Willem Janssens, the Dutch governor of the colony. As commander of its military, he withdraws after the Battle of Blaauwberg with his ragtag army to the hinterland. Who was this man? Why didn’t he surrender quickly, as other commanders under him did? In another universe, Janssens might have started a guerrilla war against the British, if only Renzi and Kydd hadn’t stopped him. But that fiction will need to wait for another book.

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