Frederick Townsend Ward was born in Massachusetts in 1831. He was a fairly rebellious kid, and left school to serve aboard a clipper ship in 1847. He briefly returned to school, but left again to serve aboard another ship, captained by his father. He served in several capacities at sea throughout the years. He did a stint filibustering. He joined the French Army and served in the Crimean War. Eventually, he just simply turned into a mercenary. He died in China in 1862. He crammed a lot of adventure into his short thirty years, that is for sure. He has a headstone in Salem, Massachusetts, but his body is not buried there. He also has a memorial in China, but the actual whereabouts of his remains are unknown.

I have had this book on my shelves for quite a while, and finally made it around to reading it. I had never heard of Frederick Townsend Ward, nor had I known that mercenaries from the United States participated in the Taipan Rebellion. This was only very briefly covered in one of my history classes in college, so this book was very valuable to me as far as educating myself went. The research was done well, and you could tell the author had studied up on this topic and knew what he was talking about. I just discovered that this author has several more books that look very interesting, so I will probably order those. I accidently ran across this one at my local used book store for a dollar. It was actually in the Civil War section, so it was a big surprise to me that it was not a Civil War book. The events in this book did take place at the same time that the United States was going through the Civil War, so perhaps that is why it was shelved that way. At any rate, I enjoyed this book. It wasn't very long either, which is helping me meet this reading challenge this year and emptying out my TBR stack.