Prisoners of Chance / The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, through His Love for a Lady of France

A borderman recounts an expedition to aid French colonial interests that leads into conflict with a remnant indigenous community and the burial mounds of an extinct civilization. The narrative follows sea voyages, clandestine inland marches, encounters with Jesuit priests and rival officers, capture by a sun-worshipping people whose rituals and strongholds the party explores, and a series of escapes and underground ventures culminating in attempts to uncover the fate of a vanished mound-building culture. Themes include cultural collision, survival amid hostile terrain and peoples, faith and superstition, and the search for historical truth through adventure and danger.