The Company's Ocean

In the year 1794, an East Indiaman is taken in the Strait of Sunda by French warships that knew her name, and knew exactly where to wait.

The war of the French Revolution has reached the farthest ocean. Fresh from the Glorious First of June, Captain Nicholas Cruwys of the Royal Navy and the frigate Topaze are ordered east — to waters he last sailed as a young officer bound for Canton, a decade and a war ago. The harbours are the ones he remembers. Nothing else is.

For this is the Company's ocean now: the East India Company, a power greater than most kingdoms, with its own armies, its own courts, its own justice. Somewhere inside its vast machinery, something rotten enough to feed French cruisers that are never quite where chance alone would put them. From Bombay to Madras to the coasts beyond, Nicholas must fight the King's war in an ocean where the King's writ runs thin, with the woman he loves and a daughter he has never seen half the world astern in Lisbon.

The Company's Ocean delivers everything readers of classic Age of Sail fiction come aboard for: frigate actions and a boarding fought hand to hand, storm and monsoon seamanship, blue-water navigation and convoy work, prize courts and prize money, spies, ciphers and secret orders, governors, admirals and great merchant houses, the wardroom and the lower deck — the whole wooden world of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy rendered in exacting period detail, from the Admiralty Board Room in Whitehall to the great harbours of British India. Meticulously researched historical naval fiction set among the true events of the French Revolutionary Wars in the Indian Ocean: the honourable East India Company at the height of its power, the corsairs of the Île de France, the VOC — the Dutch East India Company — in its final years, and a Royal Navy squadron stretched across half the world. Sea battles, seamanship, espionage, romance, and the quiet war of money and paper that could break a captain faster than any broadside.

The tenth novel of the Nicholas Cruwys Naval Series — and a complete, full-length story that may be read entirely on its own. The series follows Nicholas Cruwys from his first voyage under Captain Cook to post rank and command of a King's frigate: through the American Revolutionary War and the Battle of the Saintes, the Mediterranean and the Barbary Coast, Constantinople and the Baltic, revolutionary Paris and the Terror, the Glorious First of June, and now the Indian Ocean — ten full-length sea adventures spanning the golden age of fighting sail, for readers of the Aubrey–Maturin novels and the Hornblower saga, and for anyone who loves British naval history, Georgian England, tall ships, and the great age of sail. Authentic navigation and gunnery, real Admiralty politics, and the language of the sea as it was spoken — historical fiction without anachronism, in which friendship, honour, love and duty weigh as heavily as iron and oak.

Age of Sail historical naval fiction in the tradition of Patrick O'Brian and C. S. Forester. Begin the voyage here, or start at the first landfall and sail the whole series: Soundings Edge, Latitudes Edge, Longitudes Edge, Crescents Edge, Liberty's Edge, Northern Edge, Revolution's Edge, Burning Harbour, First of June, and The Company's Ocean.