Outskirts Press, INC.

Set in the mid-1800s, A Gripping Tale of Desperation, Disaster, and Determination

It’s 1844 in Swansea, a grimy industrial town in South Wales dominated by copper smelters. John Gibson, destitute and desperate, has just turned eighteen and he’s drunk, at the mercy of a recruiter who signs him to a twenty-year stint in the British Army. Sober, hungover, and frightened, he runs away, across the Bristol Channel to Tiverton, in Devonshire, England, where he changes his name to Taylor and is taken on as an apprentice to become a cordwainer, a shoemaker. He falls in love with Molly Lake, his boss’s comely, smart, and feisty seventeen-year-old daughter. The young couple marry and begin a family. But life is brutally harsh, and they make plans to immigrate to America. John travels ahead to find work and sends money for Molly and the children to join him. But mid-Atlantic, her ship is plagued by deadly disease and torn apart by a raging storm. A passing steamship sees the burning wreck and watches in horror as it sinks into the sea. They report all were lost.