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In this classic true adventure story, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, is 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 than 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 abroad, during a time when slavery flourished throughout the United States.

Brian Emerson is an actor and technical director with a long career in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore areas.

Captain James Riley was the captain of the United States merchant ship Commerce. He was sold into slavery after he and his crew were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa and went on to write Sufferings in Africa, a memoir about his ordeal. Riley was also the founder of Willshire, Ohio, named after William Wilshire, the man who saved him from slavery.