Juvenile fiction including the Battle of Trafalgar. A major part of the work is about a family in the UK and not HNF related.
This is a novel based partly on an actual event in England, 1805, where a Sergeant on a military transport apparently dies and is left on the shipwrecked ship. He is rescued by the members of the Henchman family - Edmund, Tom, Nell and their father, a country doctor. Their struggle to save the unfortunate man's life and then to preserve him from the authorities takes us to Suffolk at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar. The unforgiving nature of military life and the sheer horror of fighting in a ship of the line are convincingly conveyed as the book traces the careers of the different members of the family. At the centre of the book is Nell, a girl whose desire for freedom is always held in check by the fact she is female. This novel was the runner-up for the Carnegie Medal.