"A lively stirring and eminently interesting narrative." -Knickerbocker
"It is full of wit, pathos, and character painting such as is rarely to be met with." -American Review
"A work which will interest every lover of adventure." -Boston Transcript
"A most entertaining narrative that has proved quite a hit." -Home Journal
"It is spirited well written and entertaining. We commend the work to our readers as a novel book of travels and adventure." -Boston Journal
Trusting that authors of 19th century travel adventure were bound by the laws of verity, even when the truth disclosed is stranger than fiction, we read their pages with confidence. In those times of far wandering and wild adventure, we expect to be instructed and amazed by the reports of these travellers. Joseph Fabens has done his part in his 1853 book "Camel Hunt" by recording his experiences on sea and land in California and at Mogadore in the hunt for camels.
As disclosed in the "Camel Hunt," three Yankees, a Major Wallack, a certain Tom Eddington, and the author, with their wives, sail in a clipper brig to the coast of Africa in search of camels to be used in assisting the goldhunters in their migration across the American continent to the mines of California.
Fabens provides a very sprightly narrative of the voyage to Mogadore for the purchase of camels to be used in traversing the wilds and wastes of our western territory. The closing chapter, which shows us the camels and their Moorish drivers safely landed at Chagres, and disposed before their tents, a little way out of the city, is very graphic, and sheds strange light on a passage from the Merchant of Venice.
In describing a fleeting run-in with a desert nomad while in North Africa, Fabens writes:
"A few days after, on the desert at night, when we were encamped far from human habitation, I heard a sound which impressed me similarly. A solitary Arab passed our tent, urging his swift hierie to the utmost, and as he rushed by and disappeared in the trackless waste, he sent forth a howl that seemed to come from the very depths of a lost spirit. All the next day his image haunted me, hurrying purposeless and despairingly over the vast nothingness of the desert; and when darkness covered the earth, finding no confidant of his remorseful outbreaks but the night wind."
In his conclusion Fabens writes of the future of the camel in the American West, noting "we have taken the first step, we have laid the corner-stone in a new and heretofore untried business. All that we have proposed will be done, and much more — not by our little band of pioneers, but by many united in the same cause. The camel will yet be domesticated and bred in our western states and territories, as the ox, the mule and the horse now are, and will doubtless do more towards extending the outskirts of our civilization than all other appliances to boot."
About the author:
Joseph Warren Fabens (1821-1875) was an author and commercial agent, consul at Cayenne and Nicaragua, as well as filibuster in Central America in 1855 and farmer in Santo Domingo in 1859.
Other works by the author include:
• Story of Life on the Isthmus;
• Facts about Santo Domingo;
• The Last Cigar, and Fight Other Poems;
• In the Tropics
