In the autumn of 1861 a British warship is wrecked upon the coast of Southern Japan. Two officers, British Lieutenant Nicholas Barrett and Midshipman Tim Ebury, manage to struggle ashore, to embark upon a strange, exotic and violent adventure. Shipwrecked on the shore of southern Japan, they adopted into a culture struggling to determine its attitude toward foreign contact, and he becomes the catalyst in the construction of a navy for the power-hungry country.