Cretan Adventure: Armed with a letter of introduction from Paddy Leigh Fermor, Britain's greatest travel writer of the last century and carrying the author's very own 1944 wartime map, Richard Cowper traversed Crete from north to south va its highest mountain, visiting a host of guerrillas along the way. He was following the exact journey of the writer in the second world war when he masterminded the capture of a German general and smuggled him out by submarine to Egypt.