Ink Atlas

The Treasure of Pearls

by Gustave Aimard · 1860

Historical Fiction · Classics

Gustave Aimard's tale of adventure plunges into the wild borderlands of nineteenth-century Mexico, where a fugitive general's son, raised among hunters and pearl-divers, finds himself stripped of horses, arms, and allies, guarding a young woman through hostile desert country. Amid ambushes, vengeful foes, and the lure of pearl-rich coasts, loyalty and courage are tested at every turn in this swashbuckling frontier romance.

Content note: Reflects 19th-century attitudes toward Indigenous peoples and uses period terms now considered offensive.

15 chapters

A look inside

We stand on Mexican soil. We are on the seaward skirt of its westernmost State of Sonora, in the wild lands almost washed by the Californian Gulf, which will be the formidable last ditch of the unconquerable red men flying before the Star of the Empire.

Before us, the immensity of land; behind us, that of the Pacific Ocean.

O immeasurable stretches of verdure which form the ever-unknown territory, the poetically entitled Far West, grand and attractive, sweet and terrible, the natural trellis of so rich, beautiful, mighty, and unkempt flora, that India has none of more vigour of production!

To an aeronaut's glance, these green and yellow plains would offer only a vast carpet embroidered with dazzling flowers and foliage, almost as gay and multicoloured, irregularly blocked out like the pieces of glass in ancient church windows with the lead, by rivers torrential in the wet season, rugged hollows of glistening quicksands and neck-deep mud in summer, all of which blend with an unexampled brilliant azure on the clear horizon.

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