My First Sea Voyage

On 7 August 1807, a tiny Dutch naval brig, the Vlieg, slips out through the Vlie channel and sets course for Java. Aboard is a young naval officer, Quirijn Maurits Rudolph Ver Huell, nephew of the vice-admiral who commanded the Batavian flotilla.

The North Sea gives him no respite: an enemy cutter on his heels, then a night storm off the rocks of the Shetlands. Next come Madeira, the call at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the tropical calms, the crossing-the-line ceremony. An English squadron then gives chase to the brig; dismasted, she finds shelter in the Bay of All Saints, at Salvador da Bahia.

In January 1808, the fleeing Portuguese court lands in the city, escorted by the English squadron, and the ship is seized. For Ver Huell begins a captivity of nearly three years in the great slave-holding city of Brazil: processions and carnival, whale hunting, nights when knives flash, the faithful friendship of the midshipman Baud, an absurd arrest at São Omer and a return in chains.

Written in 1842 by the ship's captain he had become, a draughtsman and naturalist, these memories have the momentum of a novel of apprenticeship. What becomes of a boy who sets out for Java when the sea decides to set him down elsewhere?