The Rescue - Joseph Conrad

"The Rescue" is the third of Conrad's novels to feature Captain Tom Lingard, an independent buccaneer operating in the Malayan archipelago. Tom Lingard was probably based on the real-life William Lingard, a runaway from an English landed family who owned several ships and traded extensively (and perhaps illegally) around the Macassar Strait in the mid-nineteenth century. In this prequel to both "An Outcast of the Islands" and "Almayer's Folly", Tom Lingard, after several years of expensive preparation, is right on the verge of pulling off a noble plan to restore a tribal prince and princess to their rightful realm with the help of native allies through a show of force when he learns that a wealthy and arrogant Englishman has accidentally run his pleasure yacht aground right in the middle of his own proposed field of operations. The yacht owner refuses Lingard's pleas to leave his yacht for a few days to allow Lingard to carry out his plans, and matters soon get even stickier when a group of Lingard's notional 'allies' on shore capture the yacht's owner just as Lingard and the yacht owner's wife find they are falling in love. - Summary by Peter Dann