Master Entrick: An Adventure 1754-1756

by Michael Mott

Young Robert Entrick is kidnapped from his safe Lancashire home and forced into a life of frontier self-reliance as a bond-servant during the French and Indian War.

Genres: Historical Fiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am only dredging up what I can from my memory about this book. It was a well written but fairly ordinary boy's historical adventure set mainly in 18th-century New England and full of captures, escapes and violence. Robert Entrick, the young hero, is kidnapped on the secret orders of his uncle to be transported to America as a felon. Inheritance money is behind it all. Once over in Boston he is sold as a bond servant to a farmer. At some point he ends up being captured by the local Indians, learns to respect their ways and culture and eventually makes his way back home to England and confronts his evil relative.

I discovered later that a considerable part of the plot has very strong similarities to an earlier book by George Frederick Clarke called David Cameron's Adventures. Young Cameron is abducted from his native Scotland and ends up as a bond servant/slave on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, makes friends with an Indian slave, escapes to his tribe and after various adventures gets back home. I don't know if Michael Mott was familiar with that book or whether it was a case of creative minds following a similar path independently. Whichever it was, it is too far away in time to be of much concern.

[Dawn Cummings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable read