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Slocum, Captain. Captain Slocum was created by H. De Vere Stacpoole (Mynheer Amayat, Captain Blood (II), Lavenne, Dick Lestrange, Man in Grey (I), Jacques Radoub, Sigurdson) and appeared in seven stories in The Popular Magazine from 1915 to 1919, beginning with “The Fortunate Island” (The Popular Magazine, Nov. 20, 1915).

Captain Slocum is a South Seas Adventurer. He is the fifty-something captain of the Contra Costa, a worse-for-the-wear but still tough and resilient ship which Slocum pilots around the South Pacific, looking for treasure. Slocum is well-suited to his ship:

Slocum was a hard man in appearance and a harder man to deal with. He had gone through life without making a fortune, and he had set out in life to find one.

He had poached seals in the Yellow Sea, he had fished for trepang and bêche-de-mer on the New Guinea coast, he had tried cocoa-nut growing in Portuguese Timor, he had swapped guns and ammunition for gold dust in murky mangrove-shadowed Bornean rivers with a Dutch gun-boat feeling for him in the lower reaches. Dealings with Chinese hatchet men had left him a scar that ran from his left ear to his chin, and had you stripped him you would have found the makings of half a dozen romances in the shot holes and knife wounds marking his epidermis.

Although generally likeable, Slocum is “always or nearly always on the crooked.” But he has “appalling bad luck” and never seems to be financially successful, no matter how good his schemes are.

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