Robber Crabs Read online



  Contents

  About this book

  About the author

  Also by Joan Druett

  Title Page

  Author’s comment

  ROBBER CRABS

  Sneak preview of The Beckoning Ice

  Copyright

  About this book

  Wiki had been enjoying life in the East Indies and the South China Sea. He could speak the local language, so had sailed happily on coastwise craft in the company of Bugis rogues and pirates. But then George Rochester had arrived on the Potomac, and while it had been delightful to get together with his old college friend, it had also ruined Wiki’s current existence.

  Because of that twice-damned dog....

  About the Author

  JOAN DRUETT has been hailed as one of this generation’s finest sea-writers. A proud founding member of Old Salt Press, is a maritime historian and an expert on whaling history. Her bestselling story of the contrasting experiences of two ships’ crews who were castaway on Auckland Island, in the sub-Antarctic in 1865, is a standard in leadership studies. Her non-fiction books have received many awards, including the John Lyman Award, while her Wiki Coffin mystery series has earned her many fans.

  She lives in New Zealand with her husband, the internationally acclaimed maritime artist, Ron Druett, who has illustrated many of her books. Together, they have travelled widely, including a visit to Christmas Island, a haunting dot in the Indian Ocean, which serves as part of the setting for this story.

  To find out more about her, check the Old Salt Press website, or follow her blog, World of the Written Word.

  Also by Joan Druett

  IN THE WIKI COFFIN SERIES

  A Watery Grave

  Shark Island

  Run Afoul

  Deadly Shoals

  The Beckoning Ice

  OTHER FICTION

  A Love of Adventure

  A Promise of Gold

  NON FICTION

  Lady Castaways

  Eleanor’s Odyssey

  The Elephant Voyage

  Tupaia, Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator

  Island of the Lost

  In the Wake of Madness

  Rough Medicine

  She Captains

  Hen Frigates

  The Sailing Circle (with Mary Anne Wallace)

  Captain’s Daughter, Coasterman’s Wife

  She Was a Sister Sailor

  Petticoat Whalers

  Fulbright in New Zealand

  Exotic Intruders

  Joan Druett

  Robber Crabs

  A Wiki Coffin Story

  This story is a work of fiction. Names and descriptions of persons and ships, like the events described, are entirely the work of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  Author’s comment

  The Wiki Coffin mystery series, variously published by St Martin’s Minotaur, Allen & Unwin, and Old Salt Press, is set on the first, great, United States South Seas Exploring Expedition, commanded by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, crewed by 246 officers and men, and with seven scientists and two artists on board, which on Sunday, August 18, 1838, set sail from the Hampton Roads, Virginia, headed for the far side of the world.

  The Wiki Coffin short stories, published in The Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, feature Wiki’s adventures in his early youth, after he ran away from the college in the forests of New Hampshire, where his stepmother had sent him to learn to be a missionary. Sailing away from New England as a greenhand on the elderly Nantucket whaleship Paths of Duty, he learned the skills of seamanship, found an aptitude for picking up foreign languages by talking to Portuguese shipmates, and solved one mystery after another.

  Then, anxious to rejoin his Maori mother’s family, he jumped ship in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, where he solved a couple more mysteries before signing onto a ship that was bound for the East Indies, where his adventures recommenced.

  This story was written to link the two, by getting Wiki back into the Pacific and onto a New England whaleship, on the verge of his adventures with the Exploring Expedition.