Welcome to the fourth leg of our LibriVox World Tour! Enjoy our trip through the New World with 10 gems from our catalog.
Perfectly suited to us cheechako’s – newcomers – in these lands are the Selections from Ballads of a Cheechako by Robert W. Service, one of the best known Canadian poets.
Newcomers also are those Hindus who fight for their rights at a college in the Midwest of the USA. As the granddaughter of the college founder goes over to their side, the trouble gets even worse… Enjoy our production of Susan Glaspell’s drama Inheritors.
In 1519, Hernando Cortes and his conquistadores came to America in search of fame and riches. The History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott describes how they destroyed the empire of the Aztecs.
300 years later, in 1838, the remains of another empire – the Mayan – were discovered by John Lloyd Stevens and F. Catherwood. The former wrote down their adventures in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Vol. I.
It is clear that such a discovery in Honduras attracts many adventurers. Victor Appleton portrays the search for a Mayan idol made of pure gold in the juvenile fiction Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders.
Similarly miraculous is the island of Bermuda, certainly when seen through the eyes of Mark Twain. Picture his trip to this beautiful island with the white houses with Some Rambling Notes on an Idle Excursion.
Staying on an island is usually rather pleasant – unless you happen to be A Prisoner of Morro, like US Naval cadet Clif Faraday. Read about his adventures in the novel by Upton Sinclair, set in Cuba during the Spanish American War of 1898.
About 80 years earlier, the Caribbean was the hunting spot for pirates. Aaron Smith, on the way from Jamaica to England, was captured and enslaved by Cuban pirates, finally managed to escape – but only to be put on trial for piracy in England. The Atrocities of the Pirates is his story.
A far more romantic depiction of pirate life – as the final choice of a wrongly convicted man – is Captain Blood. Set in Barbados, the adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini was the basis for the film of the same name which made Errol Flynn famous.
Stanton H. King, born in Barbados, could only resist the siren call of the sea until his 12th birthday. Then he followed the footsteps of his older brothers and became a sailor, and endured Dog Watches at Sea for just as many years, before settling down on dry land again.
Enjoy – and send a postcard!