The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tiger Hunter, by Mayne Reid

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Title: The Tiger Hunter

Author: Mayne Reid

Release Date: April 22, 2008 [EBook #25127]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIGER HUNTER ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Tiger Hunter, by Captain Mayne Reid.

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Strictly speaking this book is a free translation by Reid (1818-1883) of
an earlier (1851) book by the Frenchman Luis de Bellemare (pseudonym of
Gabriel Ferry, 1809-1852), "Costal l'Indien." The subject is the
1811-1812 Mexican War of Independence from Spain. Reid, having fought
in the Mexican-American War of the 1850s, and having written books about
the subject, would have wanted to make this excellent book available to
an English-speaking readership, and his translation was published in
1861 with the title "A Hero In Spite Of Himself." The edition used was
published by Routledge in 1890, some years after the author's death,
with the title "The Tiger Hunter," which is what Costal was, though the
tigers referred to were actually jaguars.

The type-setting in this book was not very good, and it seems likely
that Routledge used the type from an earlier edition. To make matters
worse practically every page of the copy used had been defaced by a
rubber stamp of a previous owner, which made a day's work for the
transcriber to clean up. Nevertheless the result is excellent, the book
is very readable, and it makes a good audiobook.

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THE TIGER HUNTER, BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.

PROLOGUE.

During one of many journeyings through the remote provinces of the
Mexican republic, it was my fortune to encounter an old revolutionary
officer, in the person of Captain Castanos. From time to time as we
travelled together, he was good enough to give me an account of some of
the more noted actions of the prolonged and sanguinary war of the
Independence; and, among other narratives, one which especially
interested me was the famed battle of the _Puente de Calderon_, wher