Rites of Passage by William Golding

Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, stinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion, something happens to bring him into a ‘hell of degradation’, where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.

Number one of “To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy” – Rites of Passsage 1, Close Quarters 11, and Fire Down Below 111