Richard Woodman

When William Kite runs away to sea to escape a charge of muder, he finds himself aboard the Enterprize, a Liverpool Guineaman, or slave ship, destined for the Guinea coast of West Africa. Having loaded the slaves the ship then prepares to cross the Atlantic, bound for the sugar plantations of the West Indies.

"The Sea Warriors is the true story of the great sea captains of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the men who spent long, arduous years away from their homes fighting for king and country, to win and hold control of the seas." "Richard Woodman dissects the events of the war years, centring on the 'cruizer' war, that struggle between opposing frigates which meant the blockade of enemy ports, interception of enemy trade and the protection...

The Battle of the River Plate was the first major naval confrontation of the Second World War, and it is one of the most famous. The dramatic sea fight between German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee and the British cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles off the coast of South America caught the imagination in December 1939. Over the last 60 years the episode has come to be seen as one of the classics of naval warfare. Yet the accepted interpretation...

For the British, the Battle of the Atlantic was a fight for survival. They depended on the safe transit of hundreds of convoys of merchant ships laden with food, raw materials and munitions from America to feed the country and to keep the war effort going, and they had to export manufactured goods to pay for it all. So Britain's merchant navy, a disparate collection of private vessels, became the country's lifeline, while its seamen, officially non-combatants,...

The shattering finale to the Kit Faulkner naval adventures. England, 1659. Captain Kit Faulkner's house is prospering; his eldest son has recently returned from a profitable trip to Jamaica in the good ship Faithful, and his daughter is to be married. But the resignation of the Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell, throws England into uncertainty. Will the republic flourish, or will a King return to the throne? Kit is content to let matters take their...

In 1649, during the English Civil War, exiled Royalist Captain Kit Faulkner must stay afloat with only a fraction of the Royal Navy, all while trying to avoid losing his patron to homesickness and his true love to the predatory Prince Charles.

It is 1792 and Nathaniel Drinkwater is back in the Royal Navy, this time appointed to the twelve-gun cutter Kestrel, commanded by the inscrutable Madoc Griffiths. With the gathering menace of the French Revolution, he is involved in secret and dangerous operations off the French Coast including the rescue of émigrés and the landing of agents.
As Europe plunges deeper into war, Kestrel takes part in the struggle for supremacy in...

Captain John Mackinnon and his ship, the Matthew Flinders, are embarking on their last voyage. Both endangered species, they symbolize the irreversible, quiet decline of the British merchant fleet. But this journey to Hong Kong will prove to be anything but quiet. Internal tensions among the crew provoke unrest and lead to a navigation error, steering them right into the violent, destructive path of Typhoon David. Suddenly the crew of the Matthew...

Wrenched by tragedy from a peaceful and respectable middle-class home in Victorian London, Hannah Kemball finds herself accompanying her father, Captain "Cracker Jack" Kemball, aboard the tea-clipper Erl King on a voyage to China. It is 1869. In shanghai and Foochow, the crack British tea-clippers are loading the season's tea, preparing for the annual race to bring their valuable cargoes and the fortunes of their swaggering crews halfway around the...

"It is 1814 and Napoleon has abdicated as Emperor of the French. King Louis XVIII is brought out of his English exile and escorted back to France by an Allied squadron commanded by the Duke of Clarence. The "Great War" is at an end and Europe prepares tocelebrate the return of legitimate monarchy. But the victorious Allies are increasingly suspicious of one another. Alexander I, the capricious Tsar of Russia, believes he is the savior of the world,...