''An Old Captivity'' is a novel by British author Nevil Shute. It was first published in the UK in 1940 by William Heinemann.

Plot summary

The principal character is a young Scottish pilot with bush-flying experience in Canada, Donald Ross, who is hired by an Oxford don, Cyril Lockwood, to pilot an air survey mission of Brattalid in

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

. Lockwood's interest is in the early

Viking Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9� ...

seafarers and their exploits, and although he appears to have little knowledge of the needs of such a project, he insists on their starting as soon as possible, with his elder brother David, a businessman, providing finance. Ross, as the hired expert, then has to contend with the 'helpful' suggestions from both the financier and Lockwood's young daughter, Alix. This causes early tensions in the preparatory stages. While the preliminary dig is ongoing Ross shoulders much responsibility including keeping the aircraft safe in a tidal zone. Worn out with the expedition's work – all of which has fallen solely on him – and a prolonged lack of sleep induced by worry over the expedition, he enters a coma induced by the sleeping tablets he has been forced to take to keep going, and in it dreams that he and Alix were once Scottish slaves aboard

Leif Ericson Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky (), was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of I ...

's vessel on its voyage of discovery to Greenland. A part of this dream includes the leaving behind by the two slaves of a stone, with their names carved on it, at the Viking explorers' landing point in North America. Ross recovers and tells Alix and the don of his dreams. The last remnant of photographic survey is successfully completed, and the three complete their air crossing to North America, making landfall in eastern Canada. Flying down the coast towards New York Ross recognizes where he dreamed Leif Ericson's expedition landed on the coast of

Cape Cod Cape Cod is a peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean from the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. Its historic, maritime character and ample beaches attract heavy tourism during the summer months. The ...

; they land to investigate and find the stone with the slaves' names on it. The technical details of a trans-Atlantic flight of this period (late 1930s) are accurate and of interest. The type of aircraft is a fictional radial-engined floatplane intended for bush use, made by a fictional Detroit firm named Cosmos. It corresponds roughly to the performance of a Noorduyn Norseman. This was Shute's first attempt at re-incarnation as a plot, a second later work on this theme is '' In the Wet''.

External links

* 1940 British novels Novels by Nevil Shute Aviation novels Heinemann (publisher) books {{1940s-novel-stub