This is the 12th book in the Dawlish Chronicles series of naval adventures, set in the late-Victorian Era 1886: Captain Nicholas Dawlish, commanding a flotilla of the Royal Navy’s latest warships, is at Trinidad when news arrives of a volcanic eruption on a West Indian island. The situation is worsening and only decisive action can avert massive loss of life. He races there with his ships to render help. His enemy will be an angry mountain, vast in its malevolent power, a challenge that no naval officer has faced before. But Dawlish’s contest with the volcano is just the prelude to a longer association with the island. Its sovereignty is split – a British Crown Colony in the west, and in the east an independent republic established seven decades earlier by self-emancipated slaves. When wrenched from France through war, both seemed glittering economic prizes. Now they are impoverished backwaters where resentment seethes and old grudges fester. For many, in Roscal the existence of a ‘black republic' on its doorstep is resented, an affront to be excised. In France, a man of limitless ambition, backed by powerful interests, sees the turmoil as an opportunity that could bring him to absolute power. And, if he succeeds, perhaps trigger war in Europe on a scale unseen since the fall of Napoleon. Through this maelstrom Nicholas Dawlish must navigate a skilful course. Political concerns complicate challenges that can only be resolved by ruthless guile and calculated use of force. Lacking direct support from the Royal Navy, Dawlish must fight some of the most vicious battles of his career with inadequate resources and unlikely – and unreliable – allies. Why the Dawlish Chronicles Series? “I’ve enjoyed historical naval fiction since I was introduced to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books when I was a boy,” says author Antoine Vanner. “I’ve never tired since of stories of action and adventure by land and by sea. The Napoleonic era has however come to dominate the war and military fiction genre but the century that followed it was one no less exciting, an added attraction being the arrival and adoption of so much new technology. I’ve therefore chosen the late 19th Century – a time of massive political, social, economic, scientific and technological change – as the setting for the Dawlish Chronicles. My novels have as their settings actual events of the international power-games of the period and real-life personalities usually play significant roles. Britannia’s Rule is no exception. About the author: Antoine Vanner’s adventurous career in international business gave him the opportunity to live and work in eight countries as well as shorter assignments in a dozen more. He is bilingual in English and Dutch, adequate in Spanish, abysmal in German and has smatterings in two other languages so rusty as to be not worth mentioning. Currently living in Britain with his wife, dog and seven horses, he continues to travel extensively on a private basis. Antoine’s fiction reflects deep knowledge of all political, military and social history of the 19th Century as well as of the “cutting edge technologies” of the period. His plots are linked to real events and real characters, often in settings in which he has direct personal experience. Moral ambiguity is a major theme in his work and his protagonist, Nicholas Dawlish R.N. and his indomitable wife Florence, are confronted by difficult ethical choices as they balance ambition, duty and conscience.