Description: Signals of Distress tells the story of an American emigration vessel grounded off the coast of England in the 1830s. While The Belle of Wilmington waits to be refloated, the isolated community of Wherrytown offers what hospitality it can to the crew. But the Americans prove a disturbing presence, not least Otto, the ship's slave-cook. When Aymer Smith, the virginal soap manufacturer, arrives with his unwelcome news, tragedy and farce are unavoidable. So much the worse for Otto that Aymer is full of ideas for reform and universal brotherhood. So much the worse for Wherrytown. Signals of Distress is at once an ingenious story of shipwreck, enslavement, and emancipation, a profoundly moving tale of a culture displaced by technology, and a brilliant evocation of a small town in nineteenth-century England for whom a wreck was not a signal of distress but evidence of some better life beyond the sea.

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