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The four books reviewed here, all by Manly Wade Wellman, are not part of one of his series. They are outstanding, stand-alone works of exciting historical fiction set in various locales and times and are a good match to an upper middle school reading level.
I think we all learn, maybe because of the popularity of the Hamilton play, that Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton fought a duel in the early 1800s, in which Hamilton died. We know much less of the plan Burr almost pulled off in splitting away part of the Louisiana Purchase for his own little kingdom. Napoleon of the West: A Story of the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, is historical fiction set in 1806 in the Louisiana Territory along the Mississippi River. George Stannard comes from North Carolina to work with godfather at his plantation and is pulled back and forth by both sides, pro-Burr and anti-Burr. How he stays loyal to the United States, which was less than twenty years old, in this conflict makes for an exciting read in which the reader will learn much history about this little-known time.
Jamestown Adventure, as might be guessed from its title, is set in the very early years, 1608-1609, in the English Jamestown settlement. The hero is James Rickard, a young man who is a cousin of Captain John Smith. Though Rickard is fictional, there were young men like him who were crucial, under the leadership of Smith, to the success of the colony. Rickard interacts with and gets along well the local Native Americans, among whom are Pocahontas and her father, Powhatan. His prowess as a bowman and a wrestler makes him popular with the young men of the tribe, though he stirs up jealousy helping the Native American women make a better plow for their farming. There are also English settlers who don’t like the “special treatment” they imagine he gets as a cousin of Captain Smith. How James negotiates his way through the two sides while ultimately helping both makes for an action-packed story.
Carolina Pirate, set in 1741, tells the story of Ranald Blaikie, a 19-year-old young man who sails his father’s new schooner across the ocean from England to be used to haul cargo in their shipping business in North Carolina. While on the last leg of the voyage, sailing through the Pimlico Sound between the North Carolina mainland and the Outer Banks, his ship is captured by some of the last pirates to plague that area. The Pimlico Sound used to be a hotbed of piracy thirty years earlier – including such memorable pirates as Edward Teach or Blackbeard. Ranald agrees to navigate the pirates in exchange for letting all his passengers and crew free. How he ultimately defeats the pirates and wins freedom for himself and his friend Cato is a very exciting story, based on much real history.
Settlement on Shocco is set in what is now Warren County, North Carolina, in 1763, twelve years before the American Revolution broke out. A pioneer family named Jones follows an old Native American trail and builds a cabin on the Shocco Creek, which is a real creek today. There are families existing today who trace their ancestry back to the real Jones family and other early settlers in that area. The families in 1763 found it necessary to form counties, courts, and militia to safeguard their growing civilized community. Conflict with dishonest land dealers and unsavory rent collectors for the English Lord who owned much land in that area, along with other aspects of the tyranny of King George III, soon convince them of the need for self-government by Americans for Americans. This all makes for a most satisfying adventure story, based upon how individual Americans built a Bible-based civilization in their local area.
Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) was an interesting American writer. He was born in the country of Angola in Africa, the son of a medical officer. The family then moved to America, where Wellman got a college degree in journalism in 1926. He and his wife lived for the last several decades of his life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Wellman wrote for many different genres – comic books, mysteries, science fiction, and stories in which his heroes fought evil in the supernatural realm. Today, he is best remembered for his delightful stories and novels about Silver John, a wandering minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar who travels through the Appalachian regions and fights supernatural evil known only from whispered folk tales. During the time of his career, he also had a tremendous interest in American history, particularly of the North Carolina area, and so wrote many wonderful juvenile historical novels, like the Bear Paw Gap trilogy (see my review), his four-part American Revolution in the South series (see my review), his three-part Civil War series (see my review), and several stand-alone novels such as The River Pirates, The Master of Scare Hollow, Flag on the Levee, and Young Squire Morgan (see my reviews).