The Bloody Red Hand
A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland
A bestselling chronicler of the sea turns to a trio of his own ancestors to see what memory and the selective plundering of history has made of the truth in Northern Ireland.
The name “Lundy” is synonymous with traitor in Ulster. Derek Lundy’s first ancestral subject was the Protestant governor of Derry in 1688, just before it came under siege by the Catholic Irish army of James II. For reasons that remain ambiguous, Robert ordered the gates of the city opened in surrender. Protestant hard-liners staged a coup de ville and drove him away in disgrace, a traitor to the cause. But Robert is more memorable for his peace-seeking moderation than for the treachery the standard history attributes to him. William…
Derek Lundy is the bestselling author of Godforsaken Sea: Racing The World's Most Dangerous Waters, The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail, and The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland. He lives and rides on Salt Spring Island, B.C.