The Adventures of John Davys: A New Translation
The year is 1585. England and Spain are moving toward open war. And John Davys - navigator, theorist, one of the most accomplished seamen of his age - is sailing north, looking for a passage through the Arctic ice that will open a new route to the riches of Asia. He will not find it. He will find instead something that no map yet contains: coastlines, currents, latitudes, the precise and dangerous truth of what lies beyond the edge of the known world.
Dumas takes the extraordinary life of the historical John Davys - three Arctic voyages, the naming of a strait, service against the Spanish Armada, death at the hands of pirates in the waters off Sumatra - and builds from it a tale of maritime adventure set against the full turbulent backdrop of the Elizabethan age: the Anglo-Spanish rivalry at its most dangerous, the age of oceanic exploration at its most consequential, and the specific conditions of the far north where rank and wealth count for nothing and seamanship counts for everything.
First published in 1840, The Adventures of John Davys is Dumas in a register his most famous novels rarely occupy - the open ocean, the Arctic frontier, the world beyond the last reliable chart - written with the narrative energy that made him the most widely read author of his century and grounded in a chapter of genuine history that deserves to be far better known.
Cold, vast, and propulsive from the first page to the last.
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