The Cruise of the Alerte

In the early 1800s Spanish colonists fled the Peruvian War of Independence, taking the wondrous treasures of Lima with them. Making their escape on unguarded and poorly equipped vessels, they were easy prey for the pirates swarming off the coast. A deathbed confession by the mysterious sole survivor of one such pirate crew—including a tattered map showing the location of their buried plunder—sets off a series of unsuccessful expeditions to recover the prize. After hearing further details from the captains of those failed voyages, E. F. Knight concludes that there’s sufficient truth in the story to justify an expedition of his own, and he goes to great effort and expense to outfit his yacht Alerte for a journey to the South Atlantic island of Trinidad to seek the fabled fortune. In lucid and detailed prose, Knight recounts the challenges of finding crew and arranging provisions, the fickleness of the weather and the sea, and the dangers of hunting for treasure on an island bedeviled with blistering heat, pounding surf, frequent landslides, and hordes of bloodthirsty land-crabs. The allure of adventure in The Cruise of the Alerte inspired authors like Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons children’s series, as well as Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands.