The One-Armed Buccaneer

# The Havenless Cruiser

This serial story by Col. Prentiss Ingraham opens with fifteen-year-old Lionel Lonsdale and his Black servant Brandy surviving a devastating hurricane in a five-ton sloop off the coast, their vessel wrecked and provisions lost. Rescued by HMS Venture, a British sloop-of-war, they are carried toward India against Lionel's wishes. Working as cabin-boy, Lionel distinguishes himself through courage—climbing aloft in perilous conditions and ultimately saving Commodore from drowning sharks—earning rapid promotion through the ranks to midshipman and eventually captain of a frigate by age twenty-six.

The narrative then shifts to ten years later, with Lionel now commanding a vessel under mysterious circumstances involving a crew reassignment and "a strange story hangs thereto, a story of love, envy and hatred," suggesting romantic and antagonistic complications ahead.