Dimensions
130 x 197 x 32mm
A tour de force of historical fiction.
It is the end of the seventeenth century, and the "Rising Sun", the biggest of a five-ship flotilla, is making the perilous trip to Darien on the north coast of Panama. With it go all the hopes and fears of the Scottish people who, driven at last to defiance of their jealous and powerful neighbour, wholeheartedly throw themselves into the scramble for empire and trade, the quest for untold riches and the discovery of a promised land.
The narrator is Roderick Mackenzie, a young Scot of ambition, cunning and naivety. Having secured for himself a place aboard the "Rising Sun", he becomes the expedition's self-appointed chronicler - a task that turns out to be very different to the one that he had anticipated, as optimism turns to despair, comradeship to rivalry, and the brave colonial life to a long and heartbreaking struggle with rain, mud and disease.
