A Troubled Course: A John Pearce Adventure Volume 17

The seventeenth volume in the popular John Pearce Adventures set on the high seas

John Pearce discovers that Madrid plans to desert the British-led coalition and join the enemy. In company with Lord Langholm, he has taken a Spanish treasure ship. But a violent Atlantic westerly forces them into a deep bay overlooked by Spaniards, who have created a trap with cannon on the heights aimed at the narrow entrance.

Pearce must take the lead, exposed to plunging fire, lucky the guns do not quite have the range. Then, having succeeded, he must get Langholm’s frigate and the damaged Santa Leocadia through the same bottleneck. Only quick thinking and an act of sheer inspiration make it possible.

His orders take him via Gibraltar, then on to Admiral Jervis, who hates him, to warn of Spanish duplicity. Finally, Jervis sends him to Bastia in Corsica, where the Viceroy, Sir Gilbert Elliot, is seeking to hold the island for Britannia in the face of Napoleon’s successes in Italy.

In night actions, outnumbered on land and sea, Pearce must fight the Francophile Corsicans, who are arming themselves for an insurrection. Will he succeed, or will he, HMS Hazard, and the Pelicans pay the ultimate price of failure?

David Donachie was born in Edinburgh in 1944. He has always had an abiding interest in military history, including ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the British navy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the clandestine services during the Second World War. He has more than fifty published novels to his credit, with over a million combined sales. David lives in Deal, the historic English seaport on the border of the English Channel and the North Sea.