The first edition of this book is dated 1895. The edition used is dated about 1910. It was an edition in which two sixpenny prints of George Manville Fenn books in small type, and with two columns per large page, were bundled with it, all in the same binding. The quality of the binding is superb, but the quality of the printing and the paper used do not quite match it. The publisher was Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The number of pages is 126.

General information

This is a very well-written book, especially from the nautical point of view. It is written as by a midshipman in a British warship patrolling the west coast of Africa, especially the Congo area, to try to prevent the slave traders, especially the Portuguese, from succeeding in their efforts to get the poor captured Africans over the Atlantic to Cuba in the most miserable conditions.

But it doesn’t work out as simply as that! For the hero, Harry Dugdale, is captured in an action, and would have been killed but for the interest taken in him by the slaver-captain’s son. From this there sprang a deal with the slaver that Harry would assist with navigation and watch-keeping, but must go below decks when there is an action in progress.

We won’t tell you much more than that but cannot refrain from commenting that the book is at least as good as the best by Kingston, though in this book the action is almost entirely at sea, or at least on board a sea-going vessel.

Harry Collingwood (1851-1922). Pseudonym of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster, a civil engineer who specialised in seas and harbours.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read at www.athelstane.co.uk

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