The Anatomist's Tale

Glorious Marshalsea! The cells here - slick with algae and vomit, sweaty with the resigned terror of their occupants - have seen the end of many rogues and more than a few innocents. Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship's surgeon - until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar. Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, The Anatomist's Tale relates one man's brush with the heady freedom of outlaws - and the price of returning to "civilization".