History of von Schatt (1913-1960)

This history chronicles the origin of the von Schatt family: from the abandonment of its patriarch, Heinrich, on the steps of an orphanage in prewar Germany; through his apprenticeship on the high seas with a salty drunken smuggler; his flight from the Nazis to Sweden; his kidnapping of a child bride to America; his becoming the most feared Captain in the US military troop transport fleet; his concurrent role as husband and father of two dysfunctional Long Island families; and his lifelong obsession to uncover the secret behind a set of coordinates he'd found written on an old map.

ABOUT RICHARD DAUB
On a wood paneled wall in his grandmother's Long Island home had been hung a creepy painting of the grandfather he'd never met, a ship captain supposedly so frightening that the author, as a boy, could see fear in the eyes of the adults whenever they spoke of "The Captain", who, by then, had been dead two decades, wild tales of land and sea they probably never imagined the boy would recall later in life as a washed-up journalist turned fiction writer. Do you see any resemblance?