Cindy Vallar's Blog - Posts Tagged "cannibalism"

Battle's Flood by J. D. Davies

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


England in 1555 differs from the one in which Jack Stannard fought the Scots and witnessed the death of his friend aboard the Mary Rose. Henry VIII is dead; his daughter, Mary, sits upon the throne and expects her first child. Her husband is King Philip of Spain, but in spite of the peace between both countries, he has no desire to allow his wife’s people to venture into realms he deems the total domain of Spain, namely the New World and Africa. Not all Englishmen agree with this, chief among them being the Hawkins.

It is also a time when Catholicism once again holds sway, much to the delight of Jack and his daughter, Meg. Love blossoms between her and a young Spaniard whose father is friends with hers. Hope and prosperity give rise to great expectations, but that which is today isn’t necessarily true on the morrow.

The passing of twelve years brings many such changes. The Virgin Queen rules England and has restored the faith of her father to the land, much to Meg’s chagrin. She holds out hope that it is a temporary aberration, one that will change once again when Mary Queen of Scots succeeds her cousin Elizabeth. Jack, on the other hand, and his eldest son Tom are involved in the business of smuggling arms to France, where Protestant Huguenots are stockpiling arms for the day when the Catholic monarchy allies with Spain to stamp out the heretics. While Tom has been raised mostly in the Protestant church, his father retains many Catholic tendencies, and it is those that come to the attention of Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster.

John Hawkins’s new expedition to Guinea and possibly the Caribbean is purported to be a trading venture into Spanish domains, but it has an ulterior purpose known only to a few. Walsingham wants Jack to accompany the expedition. Although hostilities with Spain are on the distant horizon, England is unprepared to wage war at this time. Therefore, Jack must do whatever he can to keep Hawkins from breaking the fragile peace between the two countries, and to keep a detailed record of everything that happens. Such unfamiliar waters to Jack and Tom require them to hire a skilled, black Portuguese, who is somewhat abrasive at times. But the voyage gets off to a rocky start; foreign ships entering the port fail to salute and a tavern brawl creates animus between Tom and Francis Drake, who one day vows to get revenge. And venturing to strange lands with unfamiliar customs and unknown dangers adds to the perils Jack and Tom face.

Such a journey means a lengthy separation from family and friends, so Jack puts Meg in charge of the family business. She tries to warn him that her stepmother is up to no good, but time prevents him from heeding the warning. Having despised and distrusted her stepmother from the moment they first met, Meg slowly unravels the intrigue and discovers that Jennet is in league with Jack’s most hated enemy. To thwart her stepmother, Meg devises a plan of her own, one that will protect the business, her father, and the secret she guards.

Battle’s Flood is the second title in the Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal trilogy. While the prologue takes place in 1555, the majority of the story takes place between 1567 and 1569. The backdrop for the story is Hawkins’s third voyage to collect slaves in Africa and then sell them to Spanish colonists in the New World. Yet even that one event did not occur in a void, as Davies shows as he deftly weaves the tumultuous European history into this tale in ways that make it easy to understand the intricacies of trying to survive in a world verging on war. He drops you into the midst of a battle or a storm at sea with just enough description that then compels your imagination to vividly fill-in the details. Peaceful interludes are woven into engrossing and sometimes nail-biting action, rife with mutiny, poisoned arrows, tribal warfare, the slave trade, smuggling, cannibalism, love lost, betrayal, enmity, feuds, scheming, regrets, and so much more. Equally compelling is his historical note, not only because he provides the history behind the fiction but also because he addresses inconvenient truths, thorny issues, and his treatment of these in the book. While history books discuss these events and recount the unfortunate circumstances that result in the abandonment of so many, those accounts are often mere words on a page. In Battle’s Flood, Davies brings to life the infamous and the famous, and transports you back to the sixteenth century in a way that makes you feel as if you are there.




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