Chatterton, E. Keble Secret Ship: A Sea Novel

An interesting – if highly improbable – nautical spy tale from early 1939 (the novel was “First published – April 1939" according to title page verso information) that clearly prefigures the coming Second World War. Chatterton’s hero is an English merchant naval officer turned British intelligence agent battling German espionage activities in the United States, trans-Atlantic aboard the fictitious liner FLORIDA and on the home front in England. Much of the plot concerns a set of top secret naval blueprints which had been stolen by a nefarious German spy, and how Chatterton’s hero, accompanied by a plucky gal-pal, goes after the purloined documents in a sailing adventure aboard a motor yawl that takes them across the English Channel and up through the inland canals and waterways of Holland and over into the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven. There they learn that Germany has secretly constructed a modern “Q-Ship,” a warship (an aircraft carrier) that is disguised as a passenger liner, which the Nazis are preparing to use in an attack on the British Home Fleet. What is perhaps most interesting in Secret Ship is Chatterton’s outright depiction of Germany as Britain’s enemy and his assertition that Germany was on the verge of starting a “Second European War.”

The Times Literary Supplement pocket review of May 20, 1939 further notes: “Mr. Chatterton, being author of 40 sea books, sends his hero and heroine after a German spy first on an Atlantic liner, then by motor yawl past Middelburg and Gouda, with much loving detail, across the Zuyder to Groningen, and challenges comparison with Riddle of the Sands by letting them take the sea route to Wilhelmshafen. There they find a ‘secret ship’ of dangerous possibilities, defeat the secrecy, and so avert the war.” Unfortunately fiction is not fact; only five months after Secret Ship reached print, Germany indeed started the all too real Second World War.