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Average Customer Rating:

A truly inspiring story	Customer Rating:
A truly inspiring story of an age when men were men, unlike the wimps of today. Taylor's carefully researched history is written in clear, easy to read English. He is not an academic historian and he brings history to life. (I am no relation.)

A gripping read

Customer Rating:

Unlike northernfaq, I thought the cover blurb was pretty accurate: this covers the story of the disastrous storms of the 1809 season for the British in the Indian Ocean, and its aftermath when the British invaded what are now called Mauritius and Reunion, the latter being the campaign upon which Patrick O'Brien based his book "The Mauritius Command". However, I totally agree with him (?) on the quality of the book itself: I was gripped from start to finish, and literally couldn't put it down (at least not without great reluctance). Much of Stephen Taylor's research was based on the logs of the East Indiamen involved, now lodged in the British Library, which he succeeds in bringing vividly to life. There is some great fiction surrounding this period, but Taylor's story is every bit as readable.

A bit of a con but superb in its own right

Customer Rating:

Ok this ISNT a review of the entire Franco-British relationship in the Indian ocean as you might assume from the cover and blurb- its about 3 years of a struggle that lasted most of 3 centuries- but! what it is a gem of a book covering two doomed voyages and their aftermath across the indian ocean in the face of storm, wind, war and frenchmen that really gets you involved and makes for compulsive reading. Not a big book but a genuine (bar the cover and blurb) one that i loved reading.