THE RACE

In the long cold winter of 1814 Britain is exhausted after twenty years of war with France. Napoleon’s army of over a million highly trained professional soldiers are poised for invasion and only Britains battered navy stands in his way. Eurotas, an old 28-gun frigate meets the Clorinde, one of Napoleon’s latest frigates in the Bay of Biscay. Clorinde is faster, newer and almost twice her size. The battle goes on all day and most of the night. In the end Clorinde, with most of her masts shot away, surrenders. All of Eurotas’s midshipmen and half of her officers are dead and Robert Vaughan, a young 14-year old volunteer, is given command of the prize while she is towed into Plymouth. On the way a great gale pushes both ships toward the rocks and Clorinde is cut adrift an abandoned to her fate. The story starts with her survival, how Vaughan and his skeleton crew saved her from the rocks, fought off the French and returned to England and a heroic welcome. Thirty years later France is defeated and Britain is at the height of her powers. She is also overwhelmed by class-divisions and Robert Vaughan’s nephew sails the same ship sails straight into a class-war where an unnecessary race is challenged and accepted. The story of how the two ships, the now ageing frigate and all-new, steam-turbine powered warship and a technological masterpiece of her time, battle all night, each skipper using his significant but different skills to gain the advantage and how the political fall-out from the race sets the navy on a course that will, thirty years later, put Britain and the Royal Navy at a huge disadvantage.