Athelstane Ford

Restless with the dullness of provincial life, a young Norfolk man throws in his lot with his cousin Rupert and ships out aboard the privateer Fair Maid. What starts as a bid for excitement soon turns perilous. The voyage carries Athelstane Ford through rivalry, betrayal, and the hard usage of life at sea, then onward into the turbulent world of eighteenth-century India, where European traders and local powers were locked in a contest for wealth and dominion. Allen Upward wrote it in 1899, well before his verse drew Ezra Pound’s admiration, as a plain-spoken historical adventure. It belongs to the sea-and-empire storytelling popular at the close of the Victorian age, and rewards readers who like their history delivered at a gallop.