Bernard Cornwell · 1992 · sea
Bernard Cornwell's 1992 novel. Five years after Waterloo, Richard Sharpe leaves his Normandy farm to find a friend vanished in Chile. Sailing south with Patrick Harper, he calls at St. Helena for a strange audience with the exiled Napoleon, then on across the ocean to a South America in revolt - and Lord Cochrane's audacious sea-assault on the Spanish fortress of Valdivia.
- 1Normandy
Retired to a quiet Normandy farm five years after Waterloo, Richard Sharpe is begged by the wife of an old comrade, Don Blas Vivar, to sail to Chile and learn the truth of her husband's disappearance and reported death.
- 2St. Helena
On the long voyage south, Sharpe and Harper break their journey at the lonely Atlantic rock of St. Helena for an unsettling meeting with the fallen Emperor Napoleon, living out his last captivity above the sea.
- 3Valparaiso
Rounding the storms of Cape Horn, they reach the Pacific coast of Chile at Valparaiso, plunging into a colony in revolt where the Spanish empire is crumbling before the rebels and their reckless admiral, Lord Cochrane.
- 4Valdivia
Sharpe joins Cochrane's audacious seaborne storming of the great Spanish fortress-harbour of Valdivia - a near-impossible assault - and there uncovers the treachery that lay behind his friend's disappearance.