Author Description

"The Mary Deare was a 6,000-ton freighter. She had been torpedoed three times in two world wars, had been wrecked twice before. She had tramped the seven seas for more than forty years. At the formal investigation into her loss, Higgins, her First Mate, described her as 'a floating death-trap of rattling rivets and clanging plates, a piece of leaking ironmongery taken off the junk heap of the China Seas'. This was the ship that rounded Ushant on March 18, battered and exhausted by a Biscay gale, and sailed into the Channel and into the newspaper headlines - a ship of mystery and tragedy."--Publisher description.