I am very enthusiastic about this book. It is not too long, only a little more than eight hours as an audiobook. It has a good story, well told. It is full of suspense and excitement--and what more can you want.

A passenger-carrying ship has just struck a submerged wreck. It is just after the start of the 14-18 war, but we are in the Pacific and far from the scene of the war. The ship, the Andromeda, sinks, and some of the survivors make their way to an island, where they get ashore and stay for some time. During this time they come upon the evidence of a lost and great civilisation. They are also attacked by a tribe of savages, whom at first they assume to have had nothing to do with the lost civilisation. Betting that the savages are indeed the descendants of the lost people, they put up a deception which does indeed bring about the end of the savages' attack.

Needless to say, rescue of a sort comes in the end, and they all get back to their homes.

As I say, you’ll enjoy the book, especially in audiobook form.

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, and sometimes earlier than that. 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 here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk