Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn't yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island's clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood's face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle. Hurwood hefted the machete that he gripped in his left—and only— hand, and peered uneasily into the darkness that seemed to crowd up behind the torchlit vegetation around them and overhead, for the stories he'd heard of cannibals and giant snakes seemed entirely plausible now, and it was difficult, despite recent experiences, to rely for safety on the collection of ox- tails and cloth bags and little statues that dangled from the other man's belt. In this primeval rain forest it didn't help to think of them as gardes and arrets and drogues rather than fetishes, or of his companion as a bocor rather than a witch doctor or shaman.

The black man gestured with the torch and looked back at him. "Left now," he said carefully in English, and then added rapidly in one of the debased French dialects of Haiti, "and step carefully—little streams have undercut the path in many places."

"Walk more slowly, then, so I can see where you put your feet," replied Hurwood irritably in his fluent textbook French. He wondered how badly his hitherto perfect accent had suffered from the past month's exposure to so many odd variations of the language

My first purchase on the Kindle store supposedly was a source of inspiration for the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same name. And indeed it details the adventures of a young man who gets dragged into the pirate captain Edward "Blackbeard" Teach's quest for the Fountain of Youth, as first discovered by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon two hundred years earlier. There is also a good deal of voodoo and zombies in both works, but except for these topical similarities, book and movie do not have a lot in common, least of all plot and main characters.

The book follows John Chandagnac, a puppeteer who travels from Europe to Haiti to confront his uncle about his share in the family inheritance, only to have the ship he is travelling on taken over by a gang of pirates that he is forced to join. Determined to save (and ideally marry) a fellow passenger, the young daughter of an apparently mad professor, from the terrible fate her father is planning for her, as well as from her disturbing physician and the wild pirates, he has to stick around a while longer, quickly turning into Jack Shandy, first a pirate cook, eventually a pirate captain.

The two big themes here being voodoo and sailboats, and me not especially fond of voodoo (which I noticed while reading Anne Rice), the follow-up reads I have queued up are Moby-Dick and The Sea-Wolf.