‘The Riddle of the Sands’ combines spies and sailing

By Carol Campbell
For the Sunday Gazette-Mail

With its June selection, the Sunday Gazette-Mail’s Monday Book Club will begin the three-part consideration of novels about spies. The discussion of “The Riddle of the Sands” by Erskine Childers will take place at 6 p.m. June 25 at Taylor Books, Charleston.

This book is often cited as the first spy novel, though its spies, like some of the detectives we encountered in our five mystery stories, are amateurs. Carruthers, a civil servant who is languishing in London while everyone else is off on vacation, suddenly gets an invitation from a college acquaintance, Davies, to join him for some yachting and duck hunting along the Baltic coast.

As it turns out, Davies is on the trail of something more menacing and exciting than ducks. He suspects that there is some type of German military buildup behind the protection of the string of islands along the Frisian Coast.

This archipelago guards an area of shallow sand passages between the islands and the main coast that seem perfect for clandestine activity as they are largely uncharted, protected and hard to navigate. And they sit across from their mirror image on the English coast at Norfolk.

Childers

After some training for Carruthers in small yacht sailing, they set out to solve the riddle of the sands. The novel presents a tour de force of sailing technique and ingenuity and uses it to build the plot toward revealing the aim of German activity in the region.

Many readers have appreciated Childers as much for his descriptions of sailing as for his mastery of suspense and intrigue. The book gives a series of maps and charts so the reader can follow the exact course of his small yacht, The Dulcibella.

Childers was well qualified to present a primer in sailing because he was an expert sailor of small craft. In 1877, he did a Baltic cruise in his boat, The Vixen, which like the Dulcibella was a 30-foot converted lifeboat. In fact, parts of the journal from that voyage appear intact in “The Riddle of the Sands.”

Such real adventures were far from the only excitement in Childers’ life. He was raised in Dublin and later in his life became involved in the Irish struggle for independence. At one point he was apprehended while smuggling arms into Ireland aboard (you guessed it) a small yacht.

Childers was arrested and tried for participating in the resistance movement and subsequently was executed by firing squad in 1922. However, his memory is still honored by both sides in the Civil War, and his son was elected president of the Republic of Ireland in 1973.

Childers’ novel was written in 1903 in an atmosphere of decline for the British Empire after Queen Victoria’s death and the social upheaval caused by the Second Boer War. It was an attempt to alert the British public to the danger of an invasion from the continent.

The novel is part of a subgenre often called “invasion literature,” which began with a short story by George Chesney, “The Battle of Dorking,” written in 1871. The genre includes not only warnings to England about Germany, but possible invasions from outer space such as Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.”

Childers’ novel was deliberately written as a warning, but it also gives the reader the uneasy realization that the villain is not different from you or darker than you, but is exactly like you. The villain of the piece here turns out to be an Englishman whom Davies wants to believe to be innocent of nefarious plans because he has fallen in love with his daughter.

Winston Churchill said “The Riddle of the Sands” influenced the admiralty to build naval bases to defend her coasts. The novel’s impact survives in yachting lore as well. In 2003, members of the Royal Cruising Club met in the Frisian Islands to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of its publication. They sailed some of the famous sands in nine small boats.

Carol Campbell leads discussions on books for the Sunday Gazette-Mail’s Monday Book Club and the Kanawha Public Library.

The time of the monthly Monday Book Club has been changed to 6 p.m. The June discussion will be held June 25 at Taylor Books.