The story really consists of a series of nautical and shore incidents, to do with Ben Burton and his family. During the course of the story he goes from being born, to a senior Naval rank. Shortly after he is born they come across a dinghy drifting with an ayah and a small white girl, who grows up in parallel with Ben, though she is spared some of his more martial adventures.
It's always difficult to get a timescale with books like this one, as the years seem to go past much faster than the supply of adventures.
I was somewhat baffled by the paragraphing in this book. For most of the book the paragraphing is as you would expect it to be, but there is an over-supply of very long paragraphs, and some of these contain quite complex conversations, so that one is tempted to split them up so that passage looks more conventional and readable. I have not done so, except in one flagrant case, because I suspect that Kingston may have been experimenting in some way. On the other hand it may be that he had contracted to write a book of so many pages, and this was a way of condensing a long conversational exchange.
There were some other strange things to be noticed, such as places and people changing their spelling (Benjy and Benjie, for instance), within a few lines. And there were some words that Kingston spells correctly in other books, but anomalously in this one. It's almost as though he dictated the book to a typist, and then never actually read it for himself. It lends weight to the theory that Kingston books were authored by more than one person, because this one is within his rules of style, except for the really quite numerous typographical anomalies mentioned above.
Apart from that, the story is quite good to read or to listen to, just as Kingston books always are.
Kingston, William Henry Giles (1814-1880), English novelist, son of Lucy Henry Kingston, was born in London on the 28th of February 1814. Much of his youth was spent at Oporto, where his father was a merchant, but when he entered the business, he made his headquarters in London. He early wrote newspaper articles on Portuguese subjects. These were translated into Portuguese, and the author received a Portuguese order of knighthood and a pension for his services in the conclusion of the commercial treaty of 1842.
In 1844 his first book, The Circassian Chief, appeared, and in 1845 The Prime Minister, a Story of the Days of the Great Marquis of Pombal. The Lusitanian Sketches describe Kingstonâs travels in Portugal.
In 1851 Peter the Whaler, his first book for boys, came out. These books proved so popular that Kingston retired from business, and devoted himself to the production of tales of adventure for boys. Within thirty years he wrote upwards of one hundred and thirty such books. He had a practical knowledge of seamanship, and his stories of the sea, full of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes, exactly hit the taste of his boy readers.
Characteristic specimens of his work are The Three Midshipmen; The Three Lieutenants; The Three Commanders; and The Three Admirals. He also wrote popular accounts of famous travellers by land and sea, and translated some of the stories of Jules Verne.
In all philanthropic schemes Kingston took deep interest; he was the promoter of the mission to seamen; and he acted as secretary of a society for promoting an improved system of emigration. He was editor of the Colonist for a short time in 1844 and of the Colonial Magazine and East Indian Review from 1849 to 1851. He was a supporter of the volunteer movement in England from the first.
He died at Willesden on the 5th of August 1880.
The above is substantially an extract from the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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
