Release date is 2025-12-08

deaurider, PrimeNumber and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

"A true relation of the travels and perilous adventures of Mathew Dudgeon,…. is a historical adventure novel framed as a Barbary captivity narrative, written in the late 19th century. It adopts the voice of an English gentleman-mariner recounting his capture by Algerine corsairs, enslavement, and attempts at escape, blending sea peril, exotic intrigue, and episodic embedded tales. The focus is on Mathew Dudgeon’s ordeals and the people he meets—friends, foes, and star-crossed lovers—across the Mediterranean world.

The opening of this narrative follows Mathew from a Portsmouth upbringing and merchant-seafaring career to a Smyrna-bound voyage that ends in a bloody fight and capture by Algerian pirates. Pressed into service as ship’s surgeon, sold in Algiers, and set to garden labor, he befriends fellow English slaves and begins a perilous escape plot aided by Reyya, a Turkish neighbor who secretly meets him by night and supplies gear; their plan collapses amid alarms, her likely death, and a desperate flight by boat that ends in thirst, madness, and recapture. Chained to a galley, Mathew endures the brutalities of oared slavery while the fleet raids the Italian coast, where he becomes assistant to the renegade surgeon and encounters Gabriella, a noble captive who begs his help. She relates her backstory: a forbidden love with the gallant page Baptisto, a father’s refusal, a forced confinement in a convent, a daring secret marriage, and separation during flight. As the galleys near Genoa for a prisoner exchange, Gabriella is recognized by her weeping father, who seeks to ransom her—where the excerpt breaks off. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894