Scott, Douglas The Albatross Run.

A searing - and utterly convincing - depiction of a British merchant sea captain's descent into near-madness while taking his ship (the fictitious freighter KILDARE GLEN) on an unescorted voyage from India's Bombay Roads across the southern Indian Ocean (the so-called "Albatross Run") to South Africa. Set in late 1943 / early 1944, Scott's protagonist is Captain William Taggart, an internationally acclaimed hero who had earlier in the war taken on and bested a surfaced U-boat which had attacked his ship. By this point in the war, however, Taggart has begun showing signs of an ever-escalating emotional breakdown, a meltdown precipitated by the death of his only son in the North African campaign. By turns iron-willed (some would say a bully) and sympathetic, Taggart is all but destroyed by the isolation of sea command. As he fails emotionally, discipline aboard the KILDARE GLEN plummets and by the novel's midpoint he resembles nothing if not a merchant mariner version of Herman Wouk's infamous Captain Queeg of Caine Mutiny notoriety. Overtones of Billy Budd, too, are present as Taggart first takes an intense dislike to his young, 16 year old cabin boy, then begins to actually persecute the hapless youth. When the cabin boy dies after having taken ill with what eventually proves to be poliomyelitis, Taggart's crew turn thoroughly against him and, in supreme irony, deliberately keep the KILDARE GLEN from maximizing her speed towards port when Taggart himself is taken ill with appendicitis.