Cruise of the Falcon - A Voyage to South America in a 30-Ton Yacht

In 1881, a restless English barrister named Edward Frederick Knight sits down to a fish dinner in Harwich with a audacious proposal: buy a thirty-ton yacht, sail her across the Atlantic to South America, and see what wonders and dangers await. Within months, Knight and four crewmen have purchased the Falcon, refitted her in secret, and set sail into the teeth of the Atlantic, armed with little more than courage and the skeptical warnings of naysayers who suggested painting the yacht's name on her keel to aid identification when she inevitably floated upside down in some foreign sea. What follows is a voyage through tempest and calm alike: desperate storms off the Brazilian coast, the staggering beauty of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro's harbors, hunting expeditions into jungles teeming with exotic game, and front-row witnesses to the political upheavals of a continent in constant revolution. Knight records it all with the Victorians' unquenchable appetite for detail, cataloging the customs, landscapes, and peoples of South America with equal parts wonder and colonial certainty. For readers who crave the lost romance of sea travel, this is a portal to an age when a thirty-ton yacht seemed all one needed to cross an ocean and chase the unknown.