Product Description

The history is thoroughly researched the fiction inventive the style at once easygoing and rapid. & This is a marvelous and richly enjoyable novel and the intended series to follow promises to do for the American Navy and the Marines what C.S. Forester and Patrick OBrian did for the Royal Navy. & More please. --Wall Street Journal

The first novel in a brilliant new series by award-winning historian James L. Haley featuring young midshipman Bliven Putnam as he begins his naval service aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.

It is 1801 and President Thomas Jefferson has assembled a deep-water navy to fight the growing threat of piracy as American civilians are regularly kidnapped by Islamist brigands and held for ransom enslaved or killed all at their captors whim. The Berber States of North Africa especially Tripoli claimed their faith gave them the right to pillage anyone who did not submit to their religion.

Young Bliven Putnam great-nephew of Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam?? is bound for the Mediterranean and a desperate battle with the pirate ship Tripoli. He later returns under l