The numbers of men packed into each vessel never failed to amaze Hal when he saw them in a mass like this.

Smith deftly evokes not only the horrific but also the beautiful, particularly the lush landscape of Africa. This is a seafaring quest around Africa; Sir Francis, the Captain, is captured and tortured by the Dutch. The uncharted land of dragons and other dreadful creatures, who ate the flesh of men, and of dark-skinned savages who also ate men’s flesh and wore their bones as decoration.

While there is plenty of action in this story, the characters are often flat, unmotivated, and inconsistent. His hair, tied with a thong behind his head, spilled from under his cap and glistened blue-black in the early sunlight. Maybe it's the sign of a 18 year old who grew up in male company, but it could certainly stand to be reduced. It is 1884, and in the Sudan, decades of brutal misgovernment by the ruling Egyptian Khedive in Cairo precipitates a bloody rebellion and Holy War. All of the good stuff that historical fiction lovers like is here; lots of period detail, sightseeing, larger-than-life characters, historical context, and so on and so forth.

By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books and had sold more than 140 million copies.Once they had been shackled to the ringbolts in the deck of the long narrow slave hold, they could not be released until the ship docked at the end of her voyage in the ports of the Orient.

As with Smith's previous two bestsellers, River God and The Seventh Scroll, this latest epic transcends the average action-adventure yarn.

I haven't read Assegai, the most recently published of their family saga which is set in WWI times, and now I wonder if I should. The main sail filled with a boom like the discharge of cannon, she heeled eagerly to the south-easter and pressed her shoulder into the next blue swell, bursting it asunder. Hal soon learns that leading a crew is more complex than he first thought and that protecting the innocent, particularly his fellow Christians, is death-defying. Long hours he had pored over the charts in his father’s cabin when he should have been learning by rote the tables of celestial passages, or declining his Latin verbs.