Jack Higgins · 1976 · sea

Jack Higgins's 1976 novel. In August 1944, twenty-two German nuns and sailors put to sea from Brazil in a square-rigged barque, intending to sail five thousand miles home to Kiel through Allied-controlled water. The voyage runs into a hurricane off the Hebrides, and the rescue that follows is carried out by the people they are technically at war with.

1. 1
   Belem

   At Belem, the crew of the interned barque Deutschland decide to run for home rather than sit out the war - twenty-two people in a sailing ship, proposing to cross five thousand miles of ocean the Allies control.

2. 2
   The Atlantic

   North across the Atlantic under sail, avoiding shipping lanes and patrol aircraft, in a vessel so obsolete that its greatest protection is that nobody hunting submarines expects to find a square-rigger.

3. 3
   The Outer Hebrides

   Off the Hebrides a hurricane catches them, and the barque is dismasted and driven onto a reef - and the lifeboat that comes out to them is British, crewed by men who do not much care whose flag the wreck is flying.

4. 4
   Kiel

   What is left of the ship and the crew reaches Kiel at the end of the war, the voyage completed - and the point of the book is what the sea does to the categories the war insists on.