The first edition of this book is dated 1883. The edition used is dated 1883. The publisher was James Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 22 Berners St., London. The number of pages is 246.

Until about 1817 the Algerine pirates were a great nuisance, capturing vessels in the Mediterranean and beyond, and even making raiding excursions as far afield as the shores of England. They made slaves of the Europeans they captured, and over the centuries more than a million people were made into slaves. There was an attack on Algiers led by Admiral Lord Exmouth, as a result of which this nuisance was abated, and France became responsible for the North African territories involved.

The hero of the story is a young midshipman on holiday with his family at Nice on the Mediterranean shore of France. One evening he goes for a short row, but is caught out by a nasty turn in the weather. He is picked up by a pirate vessel, and taken, with others from a ship they attacked, to Algiers, where he becomes a slave. He is befriended by an African called Peter, or as he prefers, Peter the Great, He meets an English girl called Hester, and helps her to find out where her father is kept and where he is working.

Eventually they manage to escape, including Peter, and make their way back to England.

Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894), A Short Biography, with acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary.

Scottish author of boys' books, born in Edinburgh, a nephew of James and John Ballantyne, the printers. Educated at The Edinburgh Academy, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1841, and worked as a clerk in the Red River Settlement in the backwoods of northern Canada until 1847, before returning to Edinburgh in 1848. He wrote his first stories on his experiences in Canada, with books such as The Young Fur Traders (1856). Coral Island (1858) is his most famous work.

After that he wrote over eighty books for boys, which were well researched, so that he gained a reputation which led to some of his books being written at the special request of the Post Office and the London Fire Brigade. He wrote marvellous books about the building of such lighthouses as the Eddystone and the Bell Rock. He also spent time aboard the Lightship in the Goodwin Sands, and was able to write a very informative novel about his experiences there. He produced about three books a year right up to the end of his life, but his earlier books are generally thought to be his best ones.

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