Brown on Resolution is a 1929 nautical novel written by C. S. Forester, set during World War I. The hero of the novel, Leading Seaman Albert Brown, is the sole able-bodied survivor of a sunken Royal Navy warship, who single-handedly delays its attacker, a German cruiser, long enough to ensure its destruction by its pursuers. Plot The novel opens with Brown, wounded and dying, on fictional Resolution Island in the Galápagos Islands. The story is then told in flashback. The first part of the story tells of Brown's birth, as a result of a liaison between his mother, Agatha Brown, and a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Richard Saville-Samarez. It describes his upbringing in late Victorian and Edwardian England, with Agatha as an unmarried mother pretending to be a widow, and her instilling into him a sense of duty to the Navy and to his country. As soon as he is old enough (fifteen years of age), Brown joins the Navy, and at the start of World War I is serving on the cruiser HMS Charybdis at Singapore. In the second half of the story Charybdis is sunk by the fictional German armored cruiser SMS Ziethen in the eastern Pacific, and Brown, along with two severely-wounded men, is picked up as POWs by the German ship. As the Ziethen was damaged in the exchange, her captain postpones his commerce raiding mission to Australasian waters, and has to find a deserted anchorage to repair his ship. In the novel, he chooses the fictional Resolution Island in the Galápagos Islands. The resourceful Brown steals a rifle and a small amount of ammunition, water and food, escapes, and makes his way ashore, where he is able to pick off exposed crew members who are trying to repair the ship's damaged hull. As her captain has already careened his vessel, the Ziethen'''s guns cannot be brought to bear on Brown, and German landing parties are sent ashore to hunt him down. In Forester's description, Resolution Island is an almost-impenetrable tangle of sun-blasted sharp-edged lava blocks covered with cacti, making it extremely difficult for the Germans to locate Brown. Brown is able to delay the repairs for two days, but is eventually mortally wounded by a lucky rifle shot from a German sailor as the crew is being recalled to the ship. He never learns that his actions delayed the Ziethen long enough to ensure