This is the second book about the strange vessel, the "Flying Fish", that can travel on the surface of the waters, or below them, and that can rise in the air to a great height, and travel to great distances. All this is achieved by the fact that the vessel is made of the novel metal aethereum, which is lighter than air, and that the power is produced by another novel source. These two books place Collingwood among the very first authors to explore the science-fiction genre, which makes this book very important in the history of literature.

The other book about this vessel, "The Log of the Flying Fish", has several characters in common with this one, and some of their deeds, in particular the relations with various African chieftains, are continuations of the same adventures. However there are plenty of new episodes in this book.

The book dates from slightly after the Victorian era, though many of the episodes have a strongly Victorian flavour. Makes a brilliant audiobook, great fun to listen to.

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 Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner 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 ABBYY Finereader 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