Martin Conisby, five years a galley slave and living for revenge, gets his enemy, a map, and a woman he did not ask for, on an island where a dead buccaneer's treasure is buried. Farnol painted scenery in New York theaters and wrote his first novel on scraps between shifts after a foundry in Birmingham sacked him for fighting; the sea and the hatred here are both convincing, and the revenge is not the thing he ends up wanting. Sixty plates, from Howard Pyle's pirates to Dutch whalers in the ice, carry the salt, sail and peril of the Spanish Main across three centuries of seafaring art.
