Nelson. A Debt of Honour (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780994296245)

Surging from the blood-soaked decks of HMS Victory at the battle of Trafalgar to the dank dungeons and prison hulks of Britain and the untracked wilderness of colonial New South Wales, Nelson: A Debt of Honour, is a true, inspiring story of survival against insurmountable odds of an ordinary lowly-born boy thrust into extraordinary circumstances and his rite of passage to manhood fighting prejudice and discrimination in both the old and new worlds.

William Cooke is a fatherless waif raised at the Norfolk rectory of The Rev. Edmund Nelson, father of England's most famous hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson. In an extant letter written just before his death in 1801, Rev Nelson wrote to his famous son asking him to find a place for young Will.

The lad is sent to Merton, the home Nelson shares with his notorious lover Emma Hamilton. Distracted by his complicated personal life, not to mention the war against the French, Admiral Nelson side-steps his father's plea, finding a berth for the boy aboard a newly built merchant ship, then promptly forgetting about him.

Four years later 15 year-old Will serendipitously returns to Merton just as Nelson is leaving to meet his fate at Trafalgar. The Admiral accepts he has A Debt of Honour to fulfil his beloved father's death-bed plea and has him mustered to HMS Defiance before taking him aboard HMS Victory for what will be Nelson's last battle.

Nelson dies at Trafalgar, but Will survives, only to be swept up in the transportations to Australia after being wrongly convicted of stealing a pound of lead.

Cooke's journey from dank country dungeons to Gloucester Prison and finally the disease-ridden prison hulk Retribution, is precisely and carefully reconstructed from existing records and recounted in graphic detail rarely - if ever - shown in previous accounts of convict life.

After serving out his time Cooke explores the new colony looking for the opportunity to start a new life, but soon discovers there is little chance of success for an ex-convict in a colony tightly controlled by the same self-serving 'land and lineage' aristocracy who run Britain.

The device utilised to unveil Cooke's remarkable life is another remarkable extant document - an 1881 interview with Will conducted by Australian-born journalist John Haynes - co-founder with Jules Archibald of the then newly established news magazine The Bulletin. The interview ran as a full page in The Bulletin of August 20, 1881, just months before Cooke's death.

A reconstruction of the interview - featuring intuitive and at times sceptical questioning by Haynes' - is the device utilised to slowly unveil Cooke's remarkable life and how it was once inter-woven with the famous name of Britain's most revered hero - Admiral Horatio Nelson.

For all its detail, the book is no tome. Written in the modern narrative non-fiction genre, the story moves like a fast-paced, thought-provoking novel.