Voyage of the Exiles

Description

Sentenced to the gallows as a convicted pickpocket, George Prentice’s fortunes change when the sentence is reduced to serving seven years of hard labor in New South Wales. Along with over seven hundred British convicts destined for transport on a fleet of eleven ships, Prentice suddenly finds himself torn apart from his family and bound as a colony slave for a strange land sixteen thousand miles from England.

Not knowing that his daughter Katy has found employment with the fleet’s captain, or that his wife Amelia has been falsely accused of stealing and sentenced for transporting on another slave ship, George Prentice mourns the loss of his family, believing they will be separated forever. Ruthless jailors, storms, sharks, disease, squalor, and broken hearts threaten to destroy their wills to live.

From the outset in 1787, the Botany Bay Expedition under Captain Arthur Phillip faces grave dangers at sea as well as on board ship. Unaware of what lies before them, will the exiles survive to brave the wild frontiers of Australia?