Robin Lloyd Knihy

Set in Havana in 1863 during the American Civil War, the Spanish colonial city was alive with intrigue and war-related espionage. The protagonist - a young American ship captain by the name of Everett Townsend - is pulled into the war, not as a Naval Academy midshipman, as he had once hoped, but as the captain of a Havana-based blockade-running schooner. Even as Townsend gets entangled in the war effort, he also finds himself being pulled into the dangerous investigation of a murdered English diplomat which threatens his own life.

Set in early nineteenth-century Lyme, Connecticut, the story follows Elisha Ely Morgan, a young farm boy shaped by the horrors of the War of 1812 and a violent home life. With both his older brothers gone—one lost at sea and the other presumed dead—Ely decides to venture out to sea himself. He invests his meager savings to become a sailor on a square-rigged ship, embarking on a journey from New York to London in hopes of finding his missing brother, Abraham, and discovering his own path to manhood.

Set in the early nineteenth century, Rough Passage to London follows Ely, a young farm boy who escapes his troublesome home in Connecticut and becomes a cabin boy on a square-rigged ship headed for London . . . a route he hopes will lead to his disappeared older brother. As Ely learns the trade of a sailor and follows a cryptic clue to his brother's whereabouts, he experiences romance, faces a mutiny, meets Queen Victoria, and befriends historical legends such as Charles Dickens in his raucous quest.

A new seafaring novel by the author of Rough Passage to London and Harbor of Spies.