American Captain Author:Edison Marshall Homer Whitman, American Sailor, young when the last century was young, loved his vessel and became as a brother to his shipmates. In Malta he proposed to Sophia, daughter of Captain Sir Godwine Tarlton of the Royal Navy, but at the last moment she refused his hand. — Grim-faced, Homer sailed with his ship, and Fate closed in around him in a stran... more »ge and terrible way. Through treachery the ship was attacked by Barbary pirates and Homer was given a debt to pay more important than his own life.
The paying took eighteen years, sixteen of them in Africa. Here he found Isabahil of the Sahara - Isabel as he knew her - and here he won a love surpassing the love he had lost. Here too, far above the Cataracts of the Nile, he found the gold he needed for his task. A terrible act of treachery would be repaid and he and the last of his ghostly shipmates could go off watch.
Maine, Malta, Tripoli, the slave pen called the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, the tents of the Bedouin, a tomb of dry bones in the Sudan, Capetown, the palaces and gaming rooms of London -- and home! None of Edison Marshall's previous books, not even Yankee Pasha or Caravan to Xanadu, had such panoramic sweep or tells such a dynamic, moving tale.« less