The Boy Slaves

"The Boy Slaves" by Captain Mayne Reid is a novel written in the mid-19th century. The story follows a group of young boys, midshipmen in the British navy, who find themselves shipwrecked and drifting at sea after their corvette sinks. As they navigate the challenges of survival, they also face the imminent threat of enslavement, intertwining themes of adventure and peril within a narrative set against the backdrop of Africa's treacherous coast. The opening of the tale introduces the boys—Harry Blount, Terence O'Connor, and Colin Macpherson—three young midshipmen who find themselves on a topsail-yard, having escaped their sunken ship. They are accompanied by Old Bill, a sailor who cannot swim. Their struggle against the sea is marked by desperation and a fight for survival, which culminates in their eventual landing on a barren sand-spit. Exhausted and soaked, they feel the looming dangers of both the ocean and the encroaching tide, only to soon awaken from a deep sleep to discover their precarious situation further complicated by a rising storm. Their initial encounter with a dromedary and the discovery of its water supply set the stage for their quest for food and shelter in an unknown land, highlighting the tension between adventure and the ever-present threat of capture. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Thomas Mayne Reid was a British novelist who fought in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). His many works on American life describe colonial policy in the American colonies, the horrors of slave labour, and the lives of American Indians. "Captain" Reid wrote adventure novels akin to those by Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). They were set mainly in the American West, Mexico, South Africa, the Himalayas, and Jamaica. He was an admirer of Lord Byron. His novel Quadroon (1856), an anti-slavery work, was later adapted as a play entitled The Octoroon (1859) by Dion Boucicault and produced in New York.