In Search of the Red Slave by Mike Parker Pearson and Karen Godden, Sutton, £14.99, ISBN 0750929383 Reviewed by Mike Pitts
IN 1717 Robert Drury returned to London having survived shipwreck, massacre and 14 years as a slave in Madagascar. His journal was published in 1729 to small acclaim, and almost forgotten until more than a century later, when a French writer suggested it was fiction. Perhaps, literary critics then argued, it had been cobbled together by Daniel Defoe and published under a pseudonym.
For Parker Pearson and Karen Godden, authors of In Search of the Red Slave, the truth…
