The novel is based on historical events …
Since 18 June 1812, America and Britain have been at war, fighting what some will call the Second War of American Independence. It has already cost the lives of twenty thousand men. Much of the fighting has been at sea and, by the end of the war, on Christmas Eve, 1814, seven thousand American sailors are incarcerated in Dartmoor Prison, recently built for French prisoners taken in the war against Napoleon. Isolated and forbidding, it is the most feared prison in the land.