Mississippi Jack
Mississippi Jack is the fifth book in the critically acclaimed "Bloody Jack" book series. It continues after Jacky and her schoolmates return to Boston after being on a slave ship for several months. The Bloody Jack series begins with "Bloody Jack", "Curse of the Blue Tattoo", "Under the Jolly Roger", "In the Belly of the Bloodhound", and continues with "My Bonny Light Horseman", "Rapture of the Deep", "The Wake of the Lorelei Lee", "The Mark of the Golden Dragon", "Viva Jacquelina!", "Boston Jacky", and "Wild Rover No More". Plot summary. In "Mississippi Jack", the fifth installment in the  Bloody Jack series, the intrepid Jacky Faber, having once again eluded British authorities, heads west, hoping that no one will recognize her in the wilds of America. There she tricks the tall-tale hero Mike Fink out of his flatboat, equips it as a floating casino-showboat, and heads south to New Orleans, battling murderous bandits, British soldiers, and other scoundrels along the way. He is one of the many guests that go with Jacky the whole route to New Orleans. References to actual events. Jacky begins to market her own patent medicine consisting of an alcoholic tincture of opium  (better known as laudanum) and Kentucky bourbon, which she markets during medicine shows. Most patent medicines of the time were made up with similar ingredients and similar lavish claims for their efficacy. Use of these compounds was widespread and unregulated. The crew encounter a secret abolitionist running a slave-selling scam in which the "slave" is sold, and then escapes to be sold again and again. Similar plots were sometimes used to trick runaways into cooperating with a sale which would turn out to be final. After the import of foreign slaves was forbidden, the demand for slaves became very  high and numerous types of deceit and slave-stealing became common. Jacky's crew encounters a family of rogues who make their living trying to repossess escaped slaves in the fashion of Patty Cannon. Jacky herself attempts to pass for quadroon or octoroon as a disguise at one point, in an inversion of the usual trick, which was to pass people who were an eighth or a quarter African heritage as white. Several times, Jacky reflects on the diversity of her crew, which includes Native Americans, Africans and African-Americans, American Appalachians, British such as herself and her butler (or  First Mate) Higgins, and so on. This reflects the reality of pirate crews of the day, which often contained escaped black slaves.