The Riddle of the Sands (Paperback)

INTRODUCTION


THE APPOINTMENT OF ALFRED VON TIRPITZ as Secretary of State for German Naval Affairs in 1897 was the signal for what has been called 'The Great Naval Race'. Since the fall of Bismarck seven years earlier, the callow and impulsive Kaiser Wilhelm II had sought Germany's 'place in the sun' alongside Great Britain and her vast colonial Empire. To this end, a huge shipbuilding programme was undertaken to challenge the might of the Royal Navy. So successful was this programme that alarm bells began to ring in the British Admiralty. By 1902, Lord Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, commented 'If the German Fleet becomes superior to ours, the German Army can conquer this country'.
It is against this background of political and military rivalry that The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. The story is narrated by Carruthers, a young Foreign Office high-flyer, who receives an invitation to sail in the Baltic in the yacht Dulcibella by Arthur Davies, an acquaintance from university days. Dulcibella turns out to be a flat-bottomed centreboard boat of about 28 feet, far removed from the luxury steam yacht of Carruthers' imagination. However, he gradually becomes accustomed to the disciplines of small boat sailing, and when he hears of Davies's strange encounter on the Friesian coast with the mysterious Herr Dollmann and his daughter, they decide to return to those waters to see if Davies's suspicions that Dollmann is a spy can be borne out. The adventures that they have in the creeks and islands of the Ems and Weser estuaries culminate in the discovery of the terrifying secret of the sandbanks and mudflats of that sinister coast...