Darwin's Hornpipe

Darwin's Hornpipe

Deirdre Kessler

ISBN 978-1-897323-50-2

Softcover, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 192 pages

 REVIEWS

"Drawing upon her great-grandfather’s actual experiences at sea and in the Civil War, Deirdre Kessler achieves an endearing narrative of a man seeking justice in a racially divided world.... The novel feels like a cross between autobiography and scrapbook. [A] rich and captivating work."—Jesse Vanderveeken, Literary Review of Canada, Bookworm no. 36

 Darwin’s Hornpipe, a novel

“Cat o’ nine tails or overboard, McDonough.”

So begins Deirdre Kessler’s novel, Darwin’s Hornpipe. After being accused of mutiny aboard the Morning Star, a whaling barque, Will McDonough does a jig on the Union Jack and is thrown overboard. He swims to an island in the Galápagos archipelago and is marooned. After his rescue, he seeks justice for Rafael, his Cofán-Ecuadorean friend who was co-accused by the barque’s captain and succumbs to a cruel flogging. A parallel narrative follows Will’s soulmate, Nixie Austin, whose missives to him depict her trek overland with a dog and companion donkeys from the California gold fields to Prince Edward Island, where she and Will eventually reunite. Set during the American Civil War, Kessler’s Darwin’s Hornpipe is loosely based on her great-grandfather’s actual whaling ship experience: he, too, was wrongly accused of mutiny and thrown overboard near one of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago.