Hammond Innes · 1947 · sea
Hammond Innes's 1947 novel. Corporal Vardy is shipped home from Murmansk aboard a freighter whose officers are drunk, whose boats leak and whose cargo of machine parts is actually silver bullion. She is reported mined and sunk with most of her crew - and Vardy is court-martialled for mutiny for saying otherwise. A year later the same ship sends an SOS.
- 1Murmansk
Waiting in a freezing hangar on the Murmansk docks in 1945, Vardy and two other soldiers are put aboard the Trikkala for repatriation, and told to guard crates far too heavy for what is written on them.
- 2The Barents Sea
Three hundred miles north-west of Tromso the ship leaves the convoy in the dark and steers into a minefield, and Vardy - certain it was deliberate - is put into a boat before she goes down with the bullion.
- 3Falmouth
Picked up by a corvette and brought home the long way round, he lands at Falmouth, his own home town, and is arrested on the quay - charged with mutiny on the high seas, an offence that still carries a death sentence.
- 4Dartmoor
Convicted on the evidence of the men who scuttled the ship, Vardy is sent to Dartmoor - and uses what the old lags teach him to break out, because the only way to clear his name is to find a wreck the Admiralty says does not exist.
- 5Maddon's Rock
On a bare Atlantic islet north of the Hebrides, the Trikkala has been hidden and her cargo taken off - and Vardy sails north in a small boat, in filthy weather, to reach the rock before the men who put her there can finish the job.