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A Chinese Command

by: Harry Collingwood, (pseudonym), (1851-1922)

Publication date: 1915

Usage: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

Topics: Athelstane, Collingwood, Chinese, Command, PDF, HTML,

Publisher: Athelstane e-Books, London, England, United Kingdom

Collection: folkscanomy_fiction; folkscanomy; additional_collections

Contributor: Nick Hodson

Language: English

Rights: This process represents a large investment of time and skill. You may freely download a copy for your own use. We do not in the least mind if anybody wishes to offer any of our work on another website, but would point out that they should state that the copyright is ours, rather than claiming it as their own. They should also state that as we are constantly working to improve our texts, their readers should refer back to our version if they need to verify a text. Commercial use strictly forbidden.

We have two confessions to make before we tell you about the story. The first is to say that there are two missing pages from the copy of the book we used, 223 and 224, the last two pages of chapter 14, rather an exciting moment in the story. We shall try to get photocopies of these pages, but it will take time.

The second one will make you laugh: The Chinese Admiral Wong-Li, who plays a big part in the book, was always being read by the audiobook program as "wong fifty one". No doubt you can see why. So I changed his name, with apologies, to Wong-lih, thus restoring the correct pronunciation, and not making a huge difference to the story.

Frobisher is a cashiered Royal Navy ex-officer. He is approached to run some arms to the rebels in Korea, and thus make his fortune. This fails, and the arms get into the hands of the legitimate government. After some vicissitudes he finds himself in China, and talking to the above admiral, who offers him the command of a battleship, with the prospect of taking part in a war against Japan. He does this but loses his ship in a storm towards the end of the book. Meanwhile he has found the lost millions hidden away by Genghiz Khan many centuries beforehand. He has no hesitation in purloining these, and eventually on getting back to England, buying his way back into grace by presenting the nation with a number of brand-new battleships, for which bit of sleaze he is given a baronetcy, and restored to the Navy List.

It makes a good audiobook.

Notes

The PDF version is constructed from 300 dpi scans. To get best value set "Use Logical Page Numbers" to "ON" in Edit/Preferences/Page Display of your PDF viewer. To obtain the HTML file find the area on the left of this page which has PDF, HTML and TXT in it, and click on HTML. In this version the entire book appears in the one file, which also includes the style-sheet and any pictures, and is written in xhtml. The larger of the two TXT files is what you need to create an audiobook, using for instance Text Aloud MP3. The smaller of the two TXT files contains full instructions for doing so.