This short book tells the adventures over just one voyage to Shanghai of the hero, Allan Graham, whose father is a country vicar. Allan has obtained a place as an apprentice aboard the Silver Queen, which he joins at Wapping Docks. An Irish bosun, Tim Rooney, takes a liking to the lad and helps him learn the ropes. Hutcheson nearly always has an Irish co-hero in his books. We get a good description of how the vessel is warped out of the dock, how she makes her way down river, assisted by a steam-tug, and then down the English Channel and into the wide Atlantic Ocean. Allan begins to learn a bit about navigation and ship-handling, when the movement of the vessel in the Bay of Biscay causes him to retire with sea-sickness. A stowaway is found on board, in the forepeak. Allan finds an ally in the Chinese cook, Ching Wang. On the other hand the Portuguese steward, Pedro, hates that cook.
They round the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), cross the Indian Ocean, and get into the Malay seas, where they notice a proa following them. After negotiating the tail end of a typhoon, they think they have escaped these possible pirates, pass through another typhoon, in which all their storm sails are blown out, yet see the pirates again. They are blown onto the Pratas shoal, aground, in which predicament the pirates attack. Ching Wang and Allan manage to get away in one of the pirates' small boats, and sail to where they can get help for the Silver Queen from a patrolling British Naval vessel, the Blazer. Rescued, eventually they get to Shanghai, where they receive their mails--it is extraordinary how the mails are always waiting for them, no matter how fast a vessel has travelled. Back home with an uneventful voyage, and that's the end of the story. The book is very helpful in teaching you the basics of reading these old nautical novels.
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
