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Charleston, S.C.: E. E. Barclay; M. B. Crosson & Co., 1851. 8vo (9” x 5.875”), illustrated green wrappers. 32 pp., 4 b&w illus. Early ownership inscription in ink at top of p. 1 and p. 5: “Amos C. Clemson.” CONDITION: Good, wrapper cracking at spine, diagonal creases and a couple .5” tears to front wrapper and initial leaves, some light spotting and soiling.

A scarce and rather unhinged tale about a wealthy New Yorker and her ill-fated lover, mixing American expansionism, anti-Catholic undertones, and a deadly, sickle-armed virgin—inspired by one of Narciso López’s early expeditions to Cuba to seize the island from Spain and, as many Southerners hoped, incorporate it into the U.S. as a slave state.

Sophia Delaplain, after a privileged upbringing, is cast out of her father’s house for her determination to marry her childhood confidante Mortimer Bowers, who, though lower class, is a model of racial and moral purity: “His hair was of the pure auburn, and fell in natural glossy ringlets upon a neck whose lily hue told that the sons of Africa, the Spanish Moor, the Eastern Celestial, or the Aboriginal American, could claim no affinity. Nothing but the pure Circassian blood flowed there. And then he was so kind…” The young couple boards a steamer for the gold fields of California, only to be told once it is too late that they are, in fact, bound for Cuba, as part of a plot to seize the island. When they reach “St. Jago de Cuba” and the time comes to carry out the plot, the innocents rebel; Bowers manfully kills the leader of the expedition, “Capt. Bainbridge,” in a duel; and a thrilling swordfight ensues between those involved in the plot and those who had intended to reach California. Compelled to venture ashore to replenish their water supplies, Mortimer and Delaplain fall under suspicion of the chief magistrate: 

Our persons were then subjected to an examination, and, unluckily for us both, my sex was discovered. This circumstance bore hard against us. They would listen to nothing which would tend to palliate what they considered to be a very grave offence,—and they considered, or pretended to consider, that those who were capable of falling into such things, were capable of others also,—and they immediately set us down as belonging to the expedition against the Island, and consequently committed us to prison.

In jail they are questioned and then, over the course of five days, subjected to a series of horrific tortures: “we were partially strangled”; “there were four hooks attached to the rope, and one hook was inserted in each shoulder, and one in each hip, and thus we were suspended by these hooks, with our faces downward”; “we were suspended by the hair, and left to dangle,” and so on. On the sixth day, a priest “commands” Bowers’s confession, “or this was to be the last day of his life.” Insinuating that Bowers has “a particular fancy for the ladies,” the Cuban captors compel Bowers to embrace “what appeared to be the image of a beautiful virgin” (perhaps implying the most famous of all virgins). And yet when he moves to obey,

lo! I was horror-struck at beholding the image raise its arms for the purpose of returning the embrace, and in the place of what should have been its arms, two sharp instruments, in the shape of sickles, presented themselves, and clasped the body of Mortimer in their embrace. Bowers writhed in agony, but all to no purpose. I was struck dumb. The image continued to tighten its embrace, until the body of Mortimer fell, in four separate pieces, upon the floor.

Illustrations show Miss Sophia pleading with her father; Bowers bringing Capt. Bainbridge to his knees in the midst of the raging swordfight on deck; and the shackled couple enduring torture and questioning in the Cuban prison.

Erastus Elmer Barclay (ca. 1820–1888) was a popular pamphlet publisher for almost fifty years, issuing thrilling tales of murderers, assassins, cross-dressing female spies, and so on, all claiming to be “truthful, personal narratives; lives and trials of criminals…works on travel and true adventures on sea and land” (McDade p. 457). Though he was based in Philadelphia, Barclay often located the purported printing of his pamphlets near the sites of reported events: “Sometimes he used Richmond, Charleston, or St. Louis when it served his purpose” (McDade p. 457).

OCLC records just one holding, at the Huntington. We locate another at AAS.

REFERENCES: Wright II.714; McDade, Thomas. “Lurid Literature of the Last Century: The Publications of E. E. Barclay,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 80, No. 4 (1956).

Item #9866

Price: $1,250.00