Beadle's Dime Library No. 162

This issue of Beadle & Adams' pulp weekly contains "The Mad Mariner; or, Dishonored and Disowned," a sea and shore romance by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham. The serialized narrative opens with a jilted woman, Clarice, confronting her lover Neil Gregory, who is abandoning her and their illegitimate child to marry Grace Gerard under his father's pressure. Clarice vows vengeance at the Gregory family tomb. The plot then shifts to a coastal crime narrative: a pirate captain named Cloud conspires with a tavern keeper named Machino to raid a becalmed clipper ship, the Monarch, anchored in Mobile Bay. Machino promises thirty armed men from his establishment for the attack scheduled for that night. However, an American naval midshipman—revealed to be Marmaduke Gregory—unexpectedly arrives aboard a fishing smack with armed men, having learned of the intended assault and offering to defend the merchant vessel.