Gabriel Ferry

Writing under the name Gabriel Ferry, Eugène Louis Gabriel Ferry de Bellemare was a French novelist and travel writer born in Grenoble in 1809. Reliable sources describe him as the elder of two writers who used the same pen name, and note that he spent about ten years in Mexico after being sent there in 1830 to work in his father's commercial business.

That long stay shaped his work. He became known for adventure novels and travel-based writing, with stories that first appeared in periodicals such as Revue des Deux Mondes. His fiction and memoir-like travel writing drew on life in Mexico and the wider Americas, giving readers energetic scenes of wilderness travel, danger, and frontier society.

He died on January 3, 1852, while traveling toward California, when the steamship Amazon was lost in the Bay of Biscay after a fire. Works associated with him include Vagabond Life in Mexico and Le Coureur de Bois, and his reputation rests on the way he blended firsthand experience with fast-moving adventure storytelling.