Dick Sands, the Boy Captain
1879
In 1878, Jules Verne turned his imagination toward the darkest chapter in human history and produced something unexpected: a furious indictment of the slave trade wrapped in the skin of a boys' adventure novel. When fifteen-year-old Dick Sands inherits a captaincy after disaster strikes the whaling ship Pilgrim, he thinks the hardest test will be navigating the Pacific. He is wrong. The mysterious cook Negoro has sold the ship and everyone on it into the slave trade, and Dick soon finds himself marching into the heart of Africa with chains on his wrists. What follows is a harrowing journey through the Congo, where Verne, drawing on the accounts of Livingstone and Stanley, paints an unforgettable picture of a continent bleeding from the slave trade's open wound. This is Verne unbound from scientific invention, rooting his adventure in historical atrocity. The result is something rarer than any of his futuristic fantasies: a moral novel that never preaches, an adventure story that never looks away from suffering. It is for readers who loved Treasure Island but wanted something that takes injustice seriously.
