England in 1555
differs from the one in which Jack Stannard fought
the Scots and witnessed the death of his friend
aboard the Mary Rose. Henry VIII is dead;
his daughter, Mary, sits upon the throne and expects
her first child. Her husband is King Philip of
Spain, but in spite of the peace between both
countries, he has no desire to allow his wife’s
people to venture into realms he deems the total
domain of Spain, namely the New World and Africa.
Not all Englishmen agree with this, chief among them
being the Hawkins.
It is also a
time when Catholicism once again holds sway, much to
the delight of Jack and his daughter, Meg. Love
blossoms between her and a young Spaniard whose
father is friends with hers. Hope and prosperity
give rise to great expectations, but that which is
today isn’t necessarily true on the morrow.
The passing of
twelve years brings many such changes. The Virgin
Queen rules England and has restored the faith of
her father to the land, much to Meg’s chagrin. She
holds out hope that it is a temporary aberration,
one that will change once again when Mary Queen of
Scots succeeds her cousin Elizabeth. Jack, on the
other hand, and his eldest son Tom are involved in
the business of smuggling arms to France, where
Protestant Huguenots are stockpiling arms for the
day when the Catholic monarchy allies with Spain to
stamp out the heretics. While Tom has been raised
mostly in the Protestant church, his father retains
many Catholic tendencies, and it is those that come
to the attention of Francis Walsingham, the queen’s
spymaster.
John Hawkins’s
new expedition to Guinea and possibly the Caribbean
is purported to be a trading venture into Spanish
domains, but it has an ulterior purpose known only
to a few. Walsingham wants Jack to accompany the
expedition. Although hostilities with Spain are on
the distant horizon, England is unprepared to wage
war at this time. Therefore, Jack must do whatever
he can to keep Hawkins from breaking the fragile
peace between the two countries, and to keep a
detailed record of everything that happens. Such
unfamiliar waters to Jack and Tom require them to
hire a skilled, black Portuguese, who is somewhat
abrasive at times. But the voyage gets off to a
rocky start; foreign ships entering the port fail to
salute and a tavern brawl creates animus between Tom
and Francis Drake, who one day vows to get revenge.
And venturing to strange lands with unfamiliar
customs and unknown dangers adds to the perils Jack
and Tom face.
Such a journey
means a lengthy separation from family and friends,
so Jack puts Meg in charge of the family business.
She tries to warn him that her stepmother is up to
no good, but time prevents him from heeding the
warning. Having despised and distrusted her
stepmother from the moment they first met, Meg
slowly unravels the intrigue and discovers that
Jennet is in league with Jack’s most hated enemy. To
thwart her stepmother, Meg devises a plan of her
own, one that will protect the business, her father,
and the secret she guards.
Battle’s
Flood is the second
title in the Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal
trilogy. While the prologue takes place in 1555, the
majority of the story takes place between 1567 and
1569. The backdrop for the story is Hawkins’s third
voyage to collect slaves in Africa and then sell
them to Spanish colonists in the New World. Yet even
that one event did not occur in a void, as Davies
shows as he deftly weaves the tumultuous European
history into this tale in ways that make it easy to
understand the intricacies of trying to survive in a
world verging on war. He drops you into the midst of
a battle or a storm at sea with just enough
description that then compels your imagination to
vividly fill-in the details. Peaceful interludes are
woven into engrossing and sometimes nail-biting
action, rife with mutiny, poisoned arrows, tribal
warfare, the slave trade, smuggling, cannibalism,
love lost, betrayal, enmity, feuds, scheming,
regrets, and so much more. Equally compelling is his
historical note, not only because he provides the
history behind the fiction but also because he
addresses inconvenient truths, thorny issues, and
his treatment of these in the book. While history
books discuss these events and recount the
unfortunate circumstances that result in the
abandonment of so many, those accounts are often
mere words on a page. In Battle’s Flood,
Davies brings to life the infamous and the famous,
and transports you back to the sixteenth century in
a way that makes you feel as if you are there.
Book review
Copyright ©2020 by Cindy Vallar
Pirates
and Privateers
