The Flag of Distress, by Captain Mayne Reid.
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This long and at times very amusing story starts off with the sighting
of a barque under full sail in mid-Pacific, and wearing the Chilian flag
upside down. For a vessel to wear its ensign inverted is a known sign
of distress, so that the British naval vessel that sights her has to try
to board her, to render assistance. But the barque is a good sailer,
and does not reduce her sail or heave-to. She appears to have only two
men on board, rather strangely dressed in reddish fur clothing.
How this strange state of affairs arose takes the whole book to tell.
The captain of the barque and his passenger have been tied so securely
that they cannot move; the crew are no longer on board; the two men in
reddish fur turn out to be orang-outangs.
Reid was an excellent writer, credited with being the first to write in
the Wild-West genre. This book, with its background of the sea, is out
of his usual line, but it is nevertheless a quite brilliant book. You
will enjoy the part of the story that takes place on the sea-front of
San Francisco of 1849.
It makes an excellent audiobook, if you can cope with the numerous words
of unusual spelling, to represent the speech of illiterate seamen, and
the Spanish words. The latter are also to be found in Reid's Wild-West
novels. For some reason Reid often uses a few French phrases, but that
was not unusual at the time he wrote.
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THE FLAG OF DISTRESS, BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.