Enrique's Adventure

Enrique Lopez's Filipino grandfather, the founder of the secret swamp settlement of St. Malo, east of New Orleans, Louisiana, is the only living person who knows the location of a buried gold mine on the island of Luzon. This information passes to Enrique's father, Pedro, and eventually to his son.

Meanwhile at the age of fifteen, Enrique is able to aid an expedition led by Nicholas Roosevelt and organized by the wealthy New York statesman Robert Livingston, the principal author of the Louisiana Purchase, and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the first commercially viable steamboat, to investigate the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to determine whether it might be profitable to operate steamboats on these and other US western waterways.

Two years later, after reluctantly participating with sugarcane growers in quelling the largest slave rebellion in American history, Enrique is selected by the famous New Orleans attorney Edward Livingston to deliver documents verifying a monopoly over all future steamboat traffic within the entire Louisiana Purchase to the Livingston-Fulton partnership in New York.

Enrique boards a large merchant ship for a two-month voyage, from New Orleans to New York, during which he learns much about how such a vessel is operated. Among the exciting events that occur during the voyage are a boarding by the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte, a murder, a fire on the ship, the sighting of a ghost, a hurricane, and a chase by a hostile British warship that ends with Enrique's ship becalmed in the Sargasso Sea.

Fascinating characters and wild sea stories intrigue Enrique, who eventually reaches New York and delivers his documents to Livingston and Fulton, who assert that they are now in a position to dominate much of the economic life of the American West. And Enrique, while awaiting an opportunity to return home, anticipates additional adventures.

-- Norman Ferris