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xvi, 618 pp. With fold-out map. 26.8x21.7 cm (10½x8½"), full brown calf, gilt lettered spine, marbled edges of text block. First British Edition.

James Riley (1777– 1840) was the Captain of the United States merchant ship Commerce. He led his crew through the Sahara Desert, after they were shipwrecked off the coast of the Western Coast of Africa in August 1815. Riley wrote a memoir about how they came to be shipwrecked and their travails in the Sahara Desert. He told of the events leading to their capture by marauding Sahrawi natives who kept them as slaves. Horribly mistreated, they were beaten, sun-burnt, starved, and forced to drink their own urine.

This was one of the most popular books of the 19th century in the United States, probably because of interest in the Arab countries developed in the wars with the Barbary States, and because of its interesting reverse view of slavery - Moors were considered Blacks, and in this narrative they were the owners of white Americans. Huntress 190C; Sabin 71398; Hess & Coger 5681; Playfair & Brown 514: