Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal Book 2
England 1555, then 1567-8
Battle’s Flood takes forward the story of the central character from Destiny’s Tide, Jack Stannard, an ambitious shipowner and sea-captain from the ancient, decayed port of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’. A prologue, set ten years after the events of Destiny’s Tide during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, reintroduces us to his headstrong daughter Meg, now grown to adulthood, and sees Jack have a strange encounter with one of the most sinister pillars of Imperial Spain’s ‘black legend’. Fast forward another twelve years to 1567, and the second of Jack’s children, Tom, joins him on centre stage. Now a highly competent ship master and trusty lieutenant to his father, Tom seems to be happily married to a wife who connects the Stannards to one of England’s most prominent seafaring dynasties, the Hawkinses of Plymouth. But not all is as it seems, either in Tom’s domestic life or in the Stannards’ dealings with John Hawkins and his young kinsman Francis Drake. Powerful forces at the court of Queen Elizabeth I have secretive plans for Jack and Tom – plans which send them on the notorious voyage of Drake and Hawkins to the coast of west Africa and then on to the Spanish-controlled Caribbean. Meanwhile in Dunwich, Meg, who harbours treasonable secrets of her own, strives to undermine the schemes of her stepmother and half-siblings, who have recruited an unlikely ally in the shape of one of the oldest and deadliest enemies of the Stannards.
Battle’s Flood moves to a dramatic and bloody climax in the historical battle of San Juan de Ulua, when Jack and Tom Stannard fight for their lives and face their destinies…