author
John Lee Scott
A merchant sailor turned a brutal shipwreck and five months of captivity into a vivid first-person adventure. His memoir offers a rare eyewitness view of the First Opium War era, with all the fear, confusion, and resilience of lived experience.
1 Audiobook
Narrative of a Recent Imprisonment in China after the Wreck of the Kite
by John Lee Scott
About the author
John Lee Scott is known for Narrative of a Recent Imprisonment in China after the Wreck of the Kite, first published in 1841. Sources describing the book identify him as a merchant sailor and explain that the narrative is autobiographical, based on the wreck of the brig Kite in Chinese waters in 1840 during the First Opium War.
In the book, he recounts leaving South Shields aboard the Kite, surviving the vessel’s capsizing, and then being captured and held prisoner in China for about five months. The result is both a survival story and a travel narrative, written from the perspective of someone who lived through the danger rather than observing it from a distance.
Very little biographical detail about Scott himself was readily confirmed beyond what appears in connection with this memoir. Even so, his account has lasted because it preserves a direct, personal record of shipwreck, captivity, and nineteenth-century British encounters with China at a moment of conflict.