A Modern Buccaneer

At seventeen, Hilary Telfer has had enough of the respectable life unfolding before him near Sydney. His father's seafaring stories have planted something restless in his blood, and when the chance comes to sign on as a supercargo aboard a ship bound for San Francisco, he takes it. The South Pacific of the 19th century is a world of dangerous opportunity: shark-infested waters, remote island trading posts, and men who live by their own codes. Hilary encounters Captain William Henry Hayston, a figure whose reputation sends electric thrill through the young adventurer's heart. Here is a buccaneer's education in a world where fortune favors the bold and convention means nothing. Boldrewood, the pen name of Thomas Alexander Browne, wrote this novel in 1894, twelve years after his beloved "Robbery Under Arms." While it lacks that earlier work's bushranger grit, it offers something equally seductive: an ode to the magnetic pull of the sea and the men who answered its call. The novel pulses with the romance of the trader life in exotic waters, where every horizon promises profit or peril. For readers who loved "Treasure Island" and yearn for Victorian adventure at its sun-scorched, salt-sprayed best.