Judas Island (Promise of Gold book one)

by Joan Druett

Overview

The Indians had tales of a lake of gold, and a race of women who lived there, who ate off gold, lived off gold, wore gold clothing, and a queen called Calafia who named her territory California…

The Gosling, a brig of questionable ownership, has a captain who is driven by the same quest for Conquistador gold that had once drawn Henry Morgan, pirate. But, if there were dark secrets below the decks of the Gosling, actress Harriet Gray has her own surprises for the ship’s company. It was no ordinary woman who had found her way from London to the eastern Pacific, and she has no ordinary part to play in the voyage of the Gosling towards the beckoning gold.

From the brooding cliffs of Judas Island to the exotic port of Valparaiso and the magnificent vista of San Francisco Bay, the Promise of Gold saga traces the adventures of a pirate captain, his unexpected passenger, and his freebooting crew in the early months of the Californian gold rush, when rugged men braved floods and fever to follow the call of the siren gold.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045254519
Publisher:	Joan Druett
Publication date:	08/23/2013
Series:	Promise of gold , #1
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	641 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

It is no secret that I did not produce my first full length book until the age of forty. Mind you, I had published rather a lot before then, starting from my late teens, when I wrote science fiction for American magazines, and short stories for the Maori magazine "Te Ao Hou" under the pen name "Jo Friday," and then travel stories for New Zealand magazines, under my own name. However, I was mostly involved in teaching biology and English literature, and raising our two sons, Lindsay and Alastair. Then I was approached by a publisher with the idea of writing a book about the introduction of plants and animals to New Zealand -- how they were carried here in the sailing ship era, and how they failed or thrived. The result was "Exotic Intruders." Not only had I enjoyed writing the stories of the eccentric sailing ship captains and passengers who had carried such items as birds, fish eggs, racehorses, and deer through the tropics and southern ocean storms, but the book won a couple of prizes -- the Hubert Church Award and the PEN Award for Best First Book of Prose. All very encouraging. Then, on one of my quests for a travel story, I fell into a hole on the tropical island of Rarotonga, found the longlost grave of a whaling wife at the bottom, and a passion for researching the lives of captains' wives under sail was born. A Fulbright Award sent me to New England and Hawaii, and so "Abigail," "She Was a Sister Sailor," and "Petticoat Whalers" were written, the second of these winning the prestigious John Lyman Award for Best Book of American Maritime History in 1992. Since then, I have become equally fascinated with the stories of the adventurous Polynesians who shipped on board sailing ships--American whaling ships, in particular. I so I came to the story of Tupaia, the astonishing Tahitian who sailed with Captain James Cook and the naturalist, Joseph Banks ... and to my fictional half-Maori sleuth, the inimitable Wiki Coffin.