The Master Shipwright's Indictment
A Deptford Dockyard Trial, 1623

About this book:

Deptford Dockyard, 1623. The *Royal James*, a sixty-gun galleon destined to be the pride of the Stuart navy, is rising on the great slipway—but her bones are rotten. When foreman Gabriel North refuses to frame the King's ship with green, water-logged oak passed off as seasoned heartwood, he ignites a collision between the yard's hard-handed artisans and the Navy Office's smooth-fingered clerks. North knows the sound of honest timber; Nicholas Weston, a young clerk in Seething Lane, knows the silence of a ledger that balances twice over for the same stolen wood. Both men have seen where corners are cut. Both know the Duke of Buckingham demands the ship by midsummer, whatever the cost in lives.

As North battles purveyors and beadles on the frozen Thames foreshore, Weston traces a chain of false warrants, duplicate payments, and a purveyor's seal that binds them all through the smoke-choked corridors of Whitehall. The evidence lies in auger-holes and ink-stained folios, in the smell of sour sap and the weight of a bribe. But in a yard where a master shipwright's word counts for less than a clerk's neat column of figures, speaking the truth is treason—and the first witness has already been silenced.

Meticulously researched and tautly plotted, *The Master Shipwright's Indictment* plunges you into the deafening, tar-stained world of early Stuart shipbuilding, where the fate of the realm rests on the integrity of a single floor-timber—and two men who refuse to let the King's navy be built on lies.