AllMovie

The titular Royal American is a young shanghaied sailor, played by Reed Howes. Forced to work as a deckhand on a rough-and-tumble transport vessel, Howes ends up in South America, where his brutish captain intends to sell guns and ammo to a band of revolutionaries. Besting the villains, Howes gets into the thick of things himself, ultimately rescuing the heroine -- likewise "shanghaied" by the captain -- from Certain Doom. Reed Howes may not have been in the Douglas Fairbanks league, but he was an A-number-one athlete, and this film showed him off to excellent advantage. Most of the action takes place on an old-fashioned square-rigger ship, which looked as if it had been borrowed from a much more prestigious production.