A Scots surgeon's mate is cheated of his inheritance, pressed aboard a man-of-war, and carried through the Cartagena expedition, the London taverns, a French regiment and a debtors' prison. Smollett had served as a naval surgeon's mate at Cartagena himself, and the shipboard chapters were the first honest account of the lower deck in English. He was twenty-seven when he wrote it. Fifty-nine plates, from Hogarth's London to Guardi's Venice, catch the picaresque world of inns, quacks and press gangs that Smollett's hero stumbles through.
