There are few sailors who have not been beguiled by Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. This turn of the century thriller is arguably the first spy novel: it superbly dramatises the threat of invasion posed in Edwardian times by the Kaiser’s Imperial German Navy, and it gloriously evokes the pains and pleasures of cruising in small yachts. For many it’s one of half a dozen essential books in a yacht’s library. It nestles cover to wellthumbed cover with Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, Nansen’s Farthest North, Shackleton’s South!, Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and – of course – the volume of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (in two pieces).
What, then, could be more tempting than to follow in Childers’ wake by sailing across the North Sea to the German Frisian islands, where his masterpiece is set?
“A low line of sandhills, pink and fawn in the setting sun, at one end of them a little white village huddled round the base of a four-square lighthouse – such was Wangeroog, the easternmost of the Frisian islands, as I saw it on the evening of 15th October.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing. The rider was merely on the timing. It was nearly 20 years after the publication of The Riddle of the Sands that the author sacrificed his life for the cause of an independent Ireland. We should go, then, in 2022,
