Tom is a thirteen year-old whose father is a Naval Officer on the half-pay list. This dates the events, for Tom has read two of Captain Marryatt's books, which were published in the 1830s, while his father would have been recalled to duty in time for the Crimean War, so we'll put the date down as the 1840s.
The action starts in the West Indies, where Tom's father has bought a property. Tom has an accident on his way to meet his father on the way from a short visit to another island. Tom is to be sent to an English school, and on his recovery he is taken down to the harbour, and put in the charge of a ship's Captain.
The journey back to England has every misadventure that can be thought of, including a White Squall, which we would probably today call a Line Squall. The vessel is capsized. How do they recover it?
Eventually they arrive in England. And that is the end of the story, which really is an introduction to ships for young persons of about thirteen years of age.
It isn't too long, and you'll enjoy it.
It has been very hard to find anything about the life of John Conroy Hutcheson. He was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1840, and died in Portsea, England, in late 1896 or early 1897. This was picked up from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He wrote about 18 novels, most, though not all, about the sea.
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 either on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk
