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.