Cartagena; Or, The Lost Brigade

This early work by Charles W. Hall is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It contains a fictional story of heroism during the British war with Spain in the eighteenth century. On the 19th of October, 1739, war was declared between England and Spain, and the following year was one of constant warfare both on the European continent and in the New World. In the succeeding year a vast armada was fitted out in England to conquer the Spanish dependencies of the West Indies and Central and South America, and the flower of the British army were re-enforced by a Jamaican contingent, and by volunteers from all the loyal colonies of North America, to the number, it is said, of some five thousand men. Of that ill conducted and fatal enterprise I propose to tell the story, and have chosen rather to attempt to embody these shreds of history in a tale, than to make a matter of dry details of one of the least known and most interesting epochs of our colonial history.