From a young age, he had the desire to explore the seas and studied seamanship at a nautical technical institution in Venice, but his academic performance was too poor, and he never graduated.

Though knighted by the Queen of Italy and wildly popular, Salgari did not earn much money from his books and lived hand to mouth for most of his life.

After Ida was committed to a mental ward in 1911, Salgari was overwhelmed and took his own life soon afterwards, imitating the Japanese ritual of seppuku, and died on 25 April 1911.

The letter to his publisher said: To you that have grown rich from the sweat of my brow while keeping myself and my family in misery, I ask only that from those profits you find the funds to pay for my funeral.

[3] Salgari wrote more than 200 adventure stories and novels, setting his tales in exotic locations, with heroes from a wide variety of cultures.

His most famous heroes Sandokan, The Tiger of Malaysia, a Bornean prince turned pirate, and his loyal lieutenant Yanez of Gomera, led their men in attacks against the Dutch and British fleets.

The Black Corsair and Captain Morgan maintained a chivalric code in the Caribbean, while Salgari's pirates of Bermuda fought for American independence.

Many late 19th century writers such as Luigi Motta and Emilio Fancelli wrote further Sandokan adventures imitating Salgari's style: fast-paced, filled with great battles, blood, violence and punctuated with humour.

One example is the work of the director Sergio Leone, whose outlaw heroes in his Spaghetti Westerns were inspired by Salgari's piratical adventurers.

His work was very popular in Portugal, Spain and Spanish-speaking countries, where Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, all attested to reading him when young.

Che Guevara read 62 of his books, according to his biographer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who remarked that the revolutionary's anti-imperialism could be seen to be "Salgarian in origin".

Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone bears many similarities to Emilio Salgari's 1908 adventure novel Cartagine in Fiamme (Carthage is Burning).

Vitale De Stefano brought Salgari's pirates to the big screen in the early 1920s with a series of five films shot over two years, including Il corsaro nero The Black Corsair and La Regina dei caraibi (The Queen of the Caribbean).

The 1965 adventure film La montagna di luce (The Mountain of Light) was loosely based on Salgari's 1902 novel of the same title, which referred to the name of the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

These include: Donath, Viglongo, Carroccio, RCS MediaGroup, and Mondadori in Italian; Saturnino Calleja, Editorial Porrúa (Colección Sepan Cuantos) and Ediciones Gaviota in Spanish; Editora Illuminuras in Portuguese; Bouquins in French; ABLIT Verlag in German; and ROH Press in English.

Though Salgari's novels have been popular in Europe and Latin America for over a century, at present only nine titles are available in English, published by ROH Press.