The King's Own

The King's Own was published in 1830 the second book to flow from Marryat's pen. It is almost as though Marryat was born as a talented and polished writer. The fact is though that for these early books he was still at sea when most of the work was done and with lots of time since he was engaged in looking for a non existent but reported island in mid Atlantic.. William Seymour grows up on shipboard in the Royal Navy after his father is hanged during the mutiny at the Nore (1797) and later he is impressed into the crew of a daring smuggler. This amusing and exciting novel blends in the classic true tale of an English captain who deliberately lost his frigate on a lee shore in order to wreck a French line-of-battle ship.