RITES OF PASSAGE (To the Ends of the Earth)

Winner of the 1980 Booker PrizeSailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, sinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks.Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a "hell of degradation," where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth trilogy is now a BBC/PBS Masterpiece miniseries staring Benedict Cumberbatch, Jared Harris and Sam Neill.To the Ends of the Earth:1. Rites of Passage2. Close Quarters3. Fire Down Below Product Description Now reissued with a new jacket the first volume of Golding's sea trilogy, which follows the trials and fortunes of a warship captain bound for Australia. Whilst at sea he writes a journal to send back to England in which he records the mounting tensions onboard ship. From the author of LORD OF THE FLIES. Edmund Talbot Recounts His Voyage From England To The Antipodes, And The Humiliating Confrontation Between The Stern Captain Anderson And The Nervous Parson, James Colley, Which Leads To The Latter's Death. Honoured godfather, With those words I begin the journal I engaged myself to keep for you-no words could be more suitable! During the early 18th century, passengers on a ship to Australia include a parson whom the crew choses as a scapegoat.