author
Montague T. (Montague Thomas) Hainsselin
1871–1943
A Royal Navy chaplain who turned life at sea into fiction and firsthand wartime books, he wrote with the calm, observant voice of someone who had truly been there. His work ranges from naval adventure to an unusual early lost-world tale set in the Mediterranean.
1 Audiobook
In peril on the sea
by Montague T. (Montague Thomas) Hainsselin
About the author
Montague Thomas Hainsselin was a British naval chaplain and author, born in 1871 and remembered for writing about the sea, naval service, and wartime life. Reference sources identify him as a Royal Navy chaplain, and later records also connect him with church life on land, including service as vicar of Exminster.
His books draw heavily on maritime experience. They include Grand Fleet Days, In the Northern Mists: A Grand Fleet Chaplain's Note Book, Naval Intelligence, The Curtain of Steel, and the novel In Peril on the Sea. He is also noted for The Island of Maids: A Romance of the Mediterranean (1908), described by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as a lost-world story about a hidden society of women descended from ancient Greeks.
Hainsselin died in 1943. Though not widely known today, his writing offers a vivid window into early twentieth-century naval culture, mixing adventure, observation, and the perspective of a clergyman who saw war from close quarters.