The Riddle of the Sands

Front Cover
Collector's Library, 2008 - Fiction - 397 pages
Each volume in the Collector's Library series has a specially commissioned Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list. The Afterword is by Ned Halley.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Preface
11
The Letter
15
The Dulcibella
23
Davies
39
Retrospect
51
Wanted a North Wind
61
Schlei Fiord
70
The Missing Page
79
Clearing the Air
198
Imperial Escort
211
The Rubicon
218
The Little Drab Book
234
Blindfold to Memmert
247
The Quartette
267
A Change of Tactics
281
Finesse
297

The Theory
95
I Sign Articles
109
His Chance
120
The Pathfinders
130
My Initiation
140
The Meaning of our Work
153
The First Might in the Islands
160
Bensersiel
172
Commander von Bruning
181
I Double Back
315
The Seven Siels
329
The Luck of the Stowaway
343
We Achieve our Double Aim
361
Epilogue
373
Afterword
385
Further Reading
396
Biography
397
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Robert Erskine Childers was born in 1870 to an English father, Robert Caesar Childers, a famed professor of oriental languages at University College London, and his wife Anna, from the distinguished Barton family of Co Wicklow, Ireland. Both parents died from TB when he was a small boy, and Childers was brought up at his mother's family home. From Trinity College Cambridge, he went straight into the Civil Service as a House of Commons clerk, pursuing his first passion, for sailing, during the long parliamentary recesses. In 1899 he volunteered for service in the Boer War and wrote a popular account of his experiences, following this up in 1903 with The Riddle of the Sands. As a writer, he took up the cause of Irish Home Rule, and moved with his family to Ireland after distinguished service in the Royal Navy in the First World War. He was elected to the Dail, the Irish parliament, and was a delegate in the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922. But the terms fell short of his hopes of full independence, and Childers joined the Republicans in the civil war that followed. He was arrested by the Free State government and court-martialled. He was executed by firing squad on 24 November 1922.

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