This is the next book in the series after Ben Brown and the Right of Passage. In this book, we find our hero returning wounded from the battle of Barque Roads, arriving home on the Hospital Ship, along with the other severely wounded men. He is attended by three of his men, who volunteered to bring him home. Although, suffering from a ghastly head wound and hard of hearing now, he makes a remarkable recovery when he arrives home amongst his family. Unfortunately, most of his family do not want him to go back to sea again, however, he has other ideas. The crisis comes when his ship arrives back in port and he finds it has to be decommissioned along with the officers going on half pay and the men going into receiving ships including his three servants. Using his family connections, he secures a position on an armed cutter. This is the tale of a cheeky young man growing into maturity, as this book progresses he is given more and more chances to take command and to prove his worth. He is mentored by his old Captain and sustained during this adventure by his men. Later in the book he is involved in a desperate fight that will make him assume the mantle of leadership.
About the Author: William Bertram has for the last forty years researched Britain's late 18th and early 19th century Royal Navy; he specialised in the design and performance of wooden warships. Now attending Plymouth University for his degree in Maritime History and Marine Technology, he pursued this specialty further. His dissertation on the sailing qualities of 19th century warships was rapidly accepted and broadcast on Television and Radio as well as being published in the New Scientist and in journals all around the world. During his time at University, he satisfied his academic curiosity and his need to eat, by becoming a guide at Plymouth Naval Base Museum and a receptionist at Fort Bovisand. The next years were fulfilling as a teacher, but retirement threatened and so William returned to his major academic love, maritime history, luckily he was in a city steeped in the past glories of her relationship with the sea. It was at this point in William's history that he decided to write books based on the history of Plymouth and its seafaring people. Resolving to write a mixture of factual and fiction books that progress through several generations of the same family, he centered his rags to riches stories around the Brown family. Using factual evidence, he interwove the characters around Plymouth's 18th century history and streets. This clearly involved many long days of research and fact-finding, however, eventually he wrote his first novel and swiftly followed it with two more in rapid succession. Nevertheless, all three books which William wrote are based on an 18th century Plymouthian family who are clearly fictional, however, this can never be said of the novel's background, here William has meticulously used old maps, drawings and records to build up an historic environment for his characters to exist in. He has even taken photographs of the streets and places mentioned in the stories and these are to be found on his web site, (www.agesofplymouth.co.uk).