Introduction
The Riddle of the Sands is the first modern English espionage novel. Long before World War I, but in an atmosphere of growing mistrust between Britain and Germany, two English sailors stumble into a secret spying mystery on the treacherous and stormy mudflats of the German coast. They sail the Dulcibella into wild wind and weather, and enter a battle of wits with the sea as well as with the mysterious Herr Dollmann and his innocent daughter, Clara. Childers' narrative style is clear and uncomplicated, and his sailing adventure is a joy to read, still popular after one hundred years. He hauled spies and detectives into the twentieth century by favoring fact over romance and combined nineteenth-century adventure from Scott and Stevenson with schoolboy stories, Kipling's Empire, and prophecies of war. The Riddle of the Sands was also a powerful influence on John Buchan, the inventor of the modern thriller.
Erskine Childers was born in England in 1870, the second of five children, but after being orphaned as a young boy he grew up in Ireland. He was an avid sailor, as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), his only work of fiction and his greatest publishing success, attests. Childers fought with the British Army in the Boer War in South Africa and later in World War I, but his growing commitment to Irish independence led him to smuggle guns into Ireland in 1914 and to join Sinn Fein after the war. In 1922, he was executed by firing squad for treason against the British government.
The five Childers children had a traumatic childhood after their linguist father died of tuberculosis when Erskine was six years old. Their mother was immediately takenaway to protect the children from the infection, which she had caught from her husband and eventually died of nine years later. The Childers children went to live with their maternal aunt and her large family in a big country house in Ireland. Erskine was educated at the private English school of Haileybury, and he took a first-class degree in law at Trinity College, Cambridge. After university, he began work in the House of Commons as a government civil servant but volunteered for the British Army when the Boer War broke out in South Africa in 1899. After the war, with persuasion from friends, he published his diaries and letters home to his sisters as a still highly readable account of his service in an artillery unit, In the Ranks of the CIV (1900), which made him a minor literary lion. But Childers was also a sailor, and for years spent most of his free time exploring the coasts of Ireland, France, and the North Sea countries in small boats, sometimes with friends or his elder brother, Henry, but often alone, venturing into German and Danish waters as far east as the Baltic, 360 miles from London.
After he had become a success with The Riddle of the Sands in 1903, Childers met and instantly fell in love with Molly Osgood of Boston, Massachusetts, who became his wife nine weeks later. They had a blissful and strong marriage, and two sons. Childers' family life represented the maturing of his purpose, and Molly was the love of his life. But Childers never wrote another novel. In his own eyes, The Riddle of the Sands had made him an authority on the military solution to the German Question, and he determined that this was his true calling, and he turned his back on fiction. "The result of that decision was that Erskine would, in the years to come, write only serious books, books designed to be influential. Books in which the best qualities of his writing, his descriptive talents and his sense of humor, were ruthlessly excluded."
After his marriage, while Childers was working hard at trying to get elected to Parliament, he found his politics changing toward a more sympathetic view of the Irish Question. In 1908, he became committed to Home Rule, Irish independence from British rule. By 1914, he had become so devoted to the cause that he carried out a highly successful gun-running operation, using his yacht to smuggle nine hundred rifles and twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition into Ireland from Germany for the southern Irish Volunteers.
Only a few days later, war was declared between Britain and Germany, and Childers, already a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, became attached to the Royal Naval Air Service. His task was to teach navigation to the pilots on HMS Engadine, a primitive aircraft carrier, formerly a cross-Channel ferry. Minesweeping and attacks on German submarines became part of the Engadine's duties, and Childers took part in the Cuxhaven Raid on December 25, 1914, where he found himself flying over Norderney, the setting of The Riddle of the Sands. The raid was not a military success, but Childers was described by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, as having displayed "daring and ardor" on the raid. The Admiralty "also marked Childers' contribution by sending a copy of The Riddle of the Sands to every ship in the navy." Later in the war Childers served at Gallipoli, keeping enemy planes away from the evacuation from the beaches, and he spent the first part of 1916 doing pioneering air photographic reconnaissance work in Egypt, for which he was promoted to Lieutenant-Commander and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross the following year.
In August 1917, Childers was posted to Dublin as an assistant secretary at the Imperial Convention on Ireland. He later recorded: "I only waited until the end of the war, when I had faithfully fulfilled my contract with the British, to join in the movement myself." In 1919, he formally associated himself with Sinn Fein and became their propaganda and publicity expert. Childers spent the remaining four years of his life working with growing fervor for the Irish Republican cause. He moved his family to Dublin in 1920, and accompanied de Valera, president of the Irish Parliament, to London for the historic summit with British Prime Minister Lloyd George in 1921.
Nevertheless, despite his unceasing propaganda work throughout the civil war in Ireland in 1921 and 1922, Childers was doomed. He was an Englishman, he held a British military rank, and he was continually published as an "expert" on British military issues. At the outbreak of World War I, the British naval authorities, needing Childers' help as an expert in sailing in German waters, had only been able to locate him by sending a telegram to the Volunteers' headquarters in Dublin. This was remembered by the Irish Republican movement when Childers was mysteriously released after his first arrest by the British in 1921. As a stimulus to ever-increasing direct involvement in the Republican cause, Childers' resolutely English past, and The Riddle of the Sands, can be seen as a direct link to his execution by firing squad in 1922 for treason against the British government.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the British popular press and many politicians were convinced that Germany was about to invade Britain, and, more importantly, that Britain was completely unprepared for this threat. German rearmament was only one of the factors behind this, but since 1870 a torrent of sensational invasion stories had appeared in newspapers and magazines. Although Childers had had the idea for The Riddle of the Sands since early 1901, he did not know what to do with it. He wrote to his friend Basil Williams in mid-1902 to report his progress: "It's a yachting story, with a purpose, suggested by a cruise I once took in German waters. I discover a scheme of invasion directed against England." But Childers was very definite that this novel was not just fiction, but a "clarion warning" to politicians to make Britain better prepared. The book was advertised as "A Record of Secret Service, edited by Erskine Childers," and a late postscript was inserted almost at printing stage to welcome some very recent defense measures for which the book had pleaded.
The novel's theme is the relationship between Britain and Germany, in language, loyalty, and state of aggression. Carruthers is summoned by his old school friend Davies to help untangle a mystery that Davies stumbled across while doing some dangerous sailing off the German coast because Carruthers speaks German "like a native." Carruthers listens to the daughter of the man Davies suspects, and he guesses that, although she has probably spoken German since childhood, Clara Dollmann is an Englishwoman. Davies' German is terrible, but he forges his way through technical conversations with seamen and woos Clara with dogged inaccuracies. The German locals enjoy trying their English words out on the Englishmen, but the old Danish lady refuses to speak German at all, and reduces conversation attempts to silence. She is a living reminder of an older German invasion, of Denmark in 1864, foregrounded here by the hidden threat in the present, only gradually comprehended by the Englishmen.
Carruthers is a friendly and straightforward narrator, endearing in his forced adaptation to primitive and smelly conditions on Davies' yacht, and admirable as a man of action. Davies is an adorable hero, shy and bumbling on land, but a master sailor fearless in fog and in storms. There are also a beatific father figure and savior, a likeable but formidable German adversary, the villain with a secret past, and then there is the girl. Childers never liked her: "I was weak enough to spatchcock a girl into it and now find her a horrible nuisance," he wrote to a friend. But, nuisance or not, Clara Dollmann is structurally necessary to the plot. She adds humanity to Davies' motivation, and, although possibly the most dated of all the characters, she is still believable and real.
Carruthers and Davies are impressed by Germany and its attempts to create its own empire in emulation of Britain. The Riddle of the Sands offers a fascinating social history because it shows what it was like to have not yet experienced the horror of war between Britain and Germany. Davies is enthusiastic about the Kaiser, soon to be reviled in almost all British popular fiction as the devil incarnate. "That Emperor of theirs is running it for all it's worth. He's a splendid chap, and anyone can see he's right." The organization of Germany's industrial power is described admiringly. "For two days we traveled slowly up the mighty waterway that is the strategic link between the two seas of Germany. Broad and straight, massively embanked, lit by electricity at night till it is lighter than many a London street; traversed by great war vessels, rich merchantmen, and humble coasters alike, it is a symbol of the new and mighty force which, controlled by the genius of statesmen and engineers, is thrusting the empire irresistibly forward to the goal of maritime greatness."
The Riddle of the Sands was published in May 1903, and it has probably sold more than two million copies. Childers was infuriated when The Riddle of the Sands was described as fiction, because for him the prospect of German invasion was real and the danger obvious. Many reviewers at the time disagreed as to exactly what the book was. The Scotsman critiqued, "One hesitates to class it in the category of fiction," while St. James' Gazette called it, "a breezy and thoroughly entertaining romance." Other readers had no doubts. In 1910, "at a much-publicized state trial in Leipzig, two British naval officers, Captain Trench and Lieutenant Brandon, were charged and found guilty of espionage." A copy of The Riddle of the Sands had been found in their belongings in Borkum (one of the towns featured in the novel), which Lieutenant Brandon enthusiastically admitted to having read three times. A modern British historian is adamant that "The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps remain key texts to the understanding of British attitudes towards intelligence."
Childers' sailing adventure was recognized as a classic by John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), over twenty years later. "It is a tale of the puzzling out of a mystery which only gradually reveals itself, and not till the very end reaches its true magnificence; but its excitement begins on the first page, and there is a steady crescendo of interest. . . . [The characters] are the most truly realized of any adventure story that I have met, and the atmosphere of grey Northern skies and miles of yeasty water and wet sands is as masterfully reproduced as in any story of Conrad's."
Most critics balk at the amount of sailing detail in The Riddle of the Sands, which is a pity, because sailing is necessary to make the plot work. Boats run aground and can go nowhere until the tide returns, so the characters must find another way around their difficulty. Secret channels in the sands can only be found when the tide is high, and knowledge of these is power. Sailing is the only way of getting to the islands, where the secret lies, and the ability to use boats in fog is Davies' own secret weapon.
You don't need to be a sailor to enjoy or even understand this story. It probably helps to know that a binnacle and a mizzen are part of a boat, and that "taking soundings" tells you how much water is between you and the seabed, but The Riddle of the Sands can be enjoyed wholly without having ever sat in a boat. Childers' talent was to be able to go straight to the point, describing exactly why Carruthers felt such a useless waste of space on his first trip out, or how Davies' skill, and luck, as a sailor saved his life in the storm off the Hohenhorn. And the charm of the book comes from reading about the wet, salty, chilly, and aching physical work of sailing, and how enjoyable it is, once it's over. Childers was completely happy at sea in a small boat, and this enthusiasm makes his writing come from the heart.
Childers was the subject of five separate biographies in the 1970s alone, followed by a film of The Riddle of the Sands in 1979. In the mid-1990s, there was another wave of interest in his life with two more biographies, and a "continuation" of the adventures of Carruthers and Davies. Some of these works focus on his sailing, some on his Irish Republican politics, but all begin with The Riddle of the Sands. As part of the tradition of novels from the "school of physical endurance," originating in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886), The Riddle of the Sands redirected adventure writing into new channels. John Buchan's The Power-House (1913), and his Richard Hannay novels in particular, show a clear descent in plot elements from The Riddle of the Sands. The Power House "capitalizes on the mixture of complacency and latent frenzy that grips the English in the face of a coming war with Germany." Carruthers' brilliant exercise in disguise while doubling back to Esens to look for the heart of the mystery is the clear forerunner of everything that Richard Hannay and Peter Pienaar did in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916), Mr Standfast (1919) and The Three Hostages (1924). Captain W. E Johns' Biggles stories also demonstrate a debt to Childers. Biggles's sphere is in the sky, not the sea, and he is resolutely military, but his disguises and his struggles of physical endurance, in and out of war, go straight back to Carruthers in the fog on the sandbank.
When you read this book you are transported back in time. You won't get wet or salty, your arms won't ache from rowing across a choppy sea, and you won't crash your head or bark your shins against inconvenient parts of the Dulcibella, but you will revel in its adventures, and plunge into a spying mystery as invigorating and stimulating as the waters of the North Sea.
Glossary binnacle: built-in case on a boat for the compass
Boulter's: Boulter's Lock on the River Thames at Maidenhead, a popular boating spot for Londoners
ducks: white twill trousers worn for outdoor summer activities by the Edwardian gentleman, notoriously easy to get dirty, and so, when worn, they inferred the wearer's implied unconcern with their cleaning, since servants would of course attend to this
electricity: for a canal to be lit by electric light at this date in history was very up-to-date and extravagant
galliot: a square-sterned sailing vessel
Gladstone: bag like a briefcase, with two equal-sized compartments joined with a hinge, commonly used in Edwardian times for overnight stays and short trips
hardy Corinthian: an early nineteenth-century term of admiration for a sporting gentleman
helmet: a woolen-knitted cap to cover the lower face and neck, also called a balaclava, after the Battle of Balaclava (1854), where these garments were first made popular by British soldiers
jibe: 'gybe' or 'gibe', to change course by swinging the sail across to catch the wind in that direction, an action carrying a lot of force in the weight and speed of the sail's boom
kedge: a small anchor used to pull the boat along, by throwing it some distance away and then pulling against it
lee: the sheltered side away from the wind
luff: to steer a boat nearer the wind, to catch the wind from an opponent's sails
Mahan: Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), American naval historian, given the rank of Rear Admiral Retired in 1906
'meiner Freund': Davies has correctly made 'mein' masculine, as Carruthers is male, but he has used the wrong form. 'Mein Freund' would be correct. Davies' German is not
Minories: street in the City of London between Aldgate and the Tower of London, a seedy commercial district in Edwardian times, and a long way from Carruthers' office in Westminster
mizzen: the mast behind the ship's mainmast
Morvern Lodge: fictional country house in Scotland, here used by Childers to signify high society. Childers was not from high society himself, but from the intellectual gentry, and an invitation from this stratum of society would have been very attractive to his hero as one of Childers' alter egos
Norfolk jacket: particular style of tweed jacket with many pockets, worn when shooting, all-round country wear
painter: the rope used to tie a boat to its mooring
Prussia: formerly a German kingdom, but after 1870 it was the center of Bismarck's new Germany
portmanteau: a large suitcase, commonly made of stiff leather, opening into two equal-sized compartments
Procrustean beds: after Procrustes, the robber from Greek mythology who killed his victims by fitting them to a bed frame and stretching them to fit, or cutting off the parts which were too long
Solent, Southampton Water: the stretch of water in the English Channel between the south coast of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the traditional playground for English yachting
smack: a fishing boat
the Stores: the Army & Navy Stores, a department store in London, but in Childers' time the long-established reliable source of camping, hunting, sporting, and safari equipment for anywhere in the British Empire
Teuton: from the Germanic tribe of the Roman period, but used as an adjective to mean typically German, for example in thoroughness
twig: to understand or realize something
Kate Macdonald is a specialist in early twentieth-century detective and spy fiction, and is the editor of the John Buchan Journal. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from University College, London, and she lives and works in Belgium.
