The year 1777 is bleak indeed for the cause of American Independence, with the British army twice defeating Washington and taking the capital city of Philadelphia and the Royal Navy sweeping aside the defenses of the Delaware Bay. And for Captain Isaac Biddlecomb and the men of the half-built frigate Falmouth, things are direr still. After managing to slip through a British blockade, they find themselves trapped in a desolate harbor on the New Jersey coast and menaced not by the British but by the outlaw bands that terrorize the countryside and see Falmouth as a potentially valuable prize. Deserter Angus McGinty steals Biddlecomb’s most potent weapon, the captured British sloop Sparrowhawk, leaving him to face the ruthless Pine Robbers on his own, with only his diminished crew and the near-useless local militia to help. Meanwhile, Virginia Biddlecomb, trapped in occupied Philadelphia, sees her chance to play a clandestine role in the fight. In the course of her activities, however, she lets slip information that will put her husband, his ship, and his crew in mortal danger, leading to a desperate race to get the unwieldy Falmouth to a place beyond the reach of the Royal Navy.

During the French Revolutionary War the Channel Fleet played the crucial role of defending Britain from invasion, protecting Britain’s incoming and outgoing trade through the Channel and Western Approaches, and preventing the French Brest fleet from setting forth on raids and expeditions. Presenting documents revealing the evolution of this role during the war, this book focuses on the blockade of Brest. It shows how the blockade developed and tightened through the increase of Admiralty control of the disposition of the Channel Fleet. It reveals the political conflicts that existed between the Commanders-in-Chief and the Admiralty, the logistical demands that had to be met, and the response of the Admiralty and fleet officers to the Spithead Mutiny. Above all, it reveals the response of the Fleet to the challenges it met from the French in their sequence of break-outs, and from the perennial problem posed by the necessity to preserve the health of seamen. Here, confuting the claims of contemporary medical officers, is evidence that shows how scurvy remained a scourge to the very end of the war.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, not with the riches of an empire at stake, and French, English and Dutch all struggle to pry open the Spanish grip. But one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers. Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island's feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf - hulking, silent, deadly with musket and blade - lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters' camp is at all curious about his past. But when a deadly hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it up-ends the buccaneers' rough existence. And it leaves in its wake opportunity as well, a chance for a new life for LeBoeuf and his fellow hunters. This stroke of luck, however, is not all it seems, and when even greater violence is visited upon them they find themselves locked in battle with some of the most powerful and ruthless men in the Spanish Empire.