he Riddle of the Sands is set as the twentieth century dawns, illuminating a world that is deceptively but inexorably inching toward a great conflagration that will chart the course of history for the next hundred years. The old order of nation-states, in place for the 250 years since the Peace of Westphalia, is being displaced by a new system of world powers and grand alliances.

Japan has taken the trappings of a world force as it edges toward war with Imperial Russia; the United States has burst onto the world stage with its defeat of the Spanish Navy at Manila Bay; France, as always, is at loggerheads with England; and Wilhelmine Germany is busily engaged in forging and refining Bismarck's logrolling system of alliances, even after the Iron Chancellor has left the scene.

Germany, almost unnoticed by an England preoccupied with its far-flung empire, begins building a navy to challenge British rule of the seas. In 1898, German Admiral Tirpitz passes his first naval bill, projecting a navy built around nineteen battleships. Two years later he doubles the order to thirty-eight, at a time when England has neither a North Sea Fleet nor naval bases commanding the approaches to Germany. England, at the peak of its imperial power, is alone in a world increasingly hostile to its grip on the globe. The Germans, believing they can steal the march on England, thus begin a series of colossal miscalculations, sparking the flames that will consume the first half of the twentieth century.

It is into this setting of a world moving toward calamitous confrontation that Erskine Childers takes us on an unforgettable journey in search of an answer to The Riddle of the Sands. We are launched on a perilous yachting adventure into the German Frisian islands with two unlikely protagonists. Carruthers, a privileged and able young officer in the British Foreign Office, and Davies, a friend from Carruthers's days at Oxford, join forces aboard the Dulcibella, a sturdy but malodorous and impossibly cramped thirty-foot ketch. The two men set sail to solve a mystery of suspicious German military preparations Davies has stumbled upon in the treacherous tidal creeks and channels of the islands. Our yachtsmen heroes, both forged from the secret corners of Childers's own complex character, set off on a tack that will test their wits against whimsical seas and sinister Germans. Though rank amateurs as spies, Carruthers and Davies easily pick up the tricks of the ageless espionage trade—deftly evolving cover stories based on truth or partial truth, misdirection, evasion, coopted loyalties, keen analysis of the sparsest of fragments and clues, and always bold action.

As we follow Carruthers and Davies on their winding passage, we find all the elements of the modern spy thriller. Yet something seems oddly amiss. The cliff-hanging pace of the story seems, somehow, as if it is being crafted with the aid of that indispensable tool of the storyteller—hindsight. But Childers's yarn is being spun from the misty perspective of a dozen years before the outbreak of war in 1914, adding a sense verging on clairvoyance to the author's narration.