Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 578

"The Prisoner of the Weird Isles" by Edward L. Wheeler

This serial adventure, published in Beadle and Adams' Deadwood Dick, Jr., Afloat series, opens in San Francisco when a young detective named Richard Bristol—known as Deadwood Dick, Junior—encounters a starving minstrel musician named Tobias Green. Green produces a message in a bottle, discovered near Auckland, New Zealand. The message is from Falconer Fairfax, an English ship captain imprisoned on an uncharted South Pacific island called Weird Island. Fairfax reports that his own son Frank orchestrated the scuttling of their vessel and has left him enslaved under a dwarf white convict named Gogel, who tortures him monthly. Fairfax begs for rescue. Dick cables London's Lord Mayor and learns Felix Fairfax, the imprisoned man's younger son, is en route to San Francisco. The narrative appears designed to launch an expedition plot combining detective work with exotic island adventure.