The Pirate Hunter

"The Ocean Rivals" by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham This adventure serial, featured in the March 7, 1888 issue of *Beadle & Adams*, follows Rafael Rodriguez, a Spanish naval officer and Cuban planter enslaved for twelve years by a Moorish sheik in the North African desert. Rodriguez tends the sheik's herds in a remote oasis while longing for his wife and child, whom he lost years earlier to the buccaneer Belmont. Ritah, the sheik's eighteen-year-old daughter of mixed parentage—her mother was English—visits Rodriguez's oasis to offer him escape. Though Ritah confesses her love, Rodriguez refuses, remaining faithful to his distant wife. In a sacrifice of her own happiness, Ritah provides Rodriguez with a swift camel, supplies, money, and safe passage to the coast with her loyal attendant Melok. As sunset approaches, Rodriguez embarks toward freedom, leaving behind his years of captivity and desert servitude.