Hammond Innes · 1980 · sea

Hammond Innes's 1980 novel. A property valuer pricing up an Essex farmhouse finds two albums of Solomon Islands stamps and, through them, the wreckage of a colonial trading family. A valuing job in Australia carries him out to the Pacific, where the family's last surviving son is running guns for Bougainville's attempt to break away.

1. 1
   Essex

   Roy Slingsby, valuing an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside, is caught by two albums of Solomon Islands stamps - and by the history of the Holland family, who traded their way through the Pacific.

2. 2
   Sydney

   A valuing commission takes him to Australia, and in Sydney the stamps stop being a curiosity: there are people who want them, people who want the family papers, and a shipping business with debts and a very odd cargo manifest.

3. 3
   Buka

   North into the islands, the trading schooner works up to Buka passage, where the copra runs and the mission stations sit alongside a colonial order that is visibly ending, and where nobody will discuss what the ship is carrying.

4. 4
   Bougainville

   On Bougainville the copper mine, the independence movement and the last Holland converge - and the stamps in an Essex farmhouse turn out to be the paper trail of an insurrection.