MP3 Audios - Biography

"Reader Brian Emerson is monotonous and cool, punctuating sentences by prolonging the last word and dropping his voice. The didactic, well-pronounced delivery makes the history seem plausible."AudioFile

In this classic tale of adventure, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, was captured by a band of nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. Thus begins an epic adventure of survival and a quest for freedom that takes him across the Sahara desert.

This dramatic account of Captain Riley's trials and sufferings sold more that one million copies in his day and was even read by a young and impressionable Abraham Lincoln. The degradations of a slave existence and the courage to survive under the most harrowing conditions have rarely been recorded with such painful honesty.

Sufferings in Africa is a classic travel-adventure narrative and a fascinating testament of white Americans enslaved abroadduring a time when slavery flourished throughout the United States.

James Riley was born in Connecticut in 1777. He had a modest education, and in 1812 he volunteered to go to war. He distinguished himself on the battlefield and was made a captain. After the war he became the master of the American brig Commerce, until a shipwreck off the coast of Africa in 1815, when he was captured and sold into slavery. After his rescue, he lived in Washington and in 1817 published an account of his ordeal. He died in 1839 and was buried at sea.