A Spanish-born buccaneer develops an unfortunate obsession for a beautiful senora who is living with her exiled father in New Orleans. The unscrupulous pirate sails his brigantine there for the specific purpose of renewing his unwelcome attentions and winning her heart—and if that fails, abducting her and forcing her to be his wife. In the modern era we would label him a dangerous stalker. And of course there is sailing involved... as should be the case with all novels.
Published originally in 1858, Captain Belt; or, The Buccaneer of the Gulf was issue numbers 11–14 of the fourth volume of The Weekly Novelette series published by M. M. Ballou in Boston, Massachusetts; each novel of the series being published in four issues over the course of four weeks. Each issue was priced at ten cents, making these "dime novels" supposedly, even though it would cost the reader forty cents to read the entirety of a story. And in addition to that contradiction, at more than 67,000 words Captain Belt is technically a full-sized novel in length, not a novelette.
The credited author, F. Clinton Barrington, is a pen name for Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809–1860), most famous for his epistolary Hebraic Power Trilogy novels. Before he became a pastor and completed those famous works he was a prolific writer of pulp fiction, or "yellow-covered filth" as the more religious folk labeled it at the time. As a pulp fiction author he would certainly rate as one of the more polished writers, and he must have had some experience at sea because the sailing action in his novels is among the best ever created.
Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing. We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison. Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book. While remaining faithful to a writer's original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes. If the printer became distracted after placing an 'a' at the end of a line and then placed another 'a' at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too? Not us. That's why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.
