This is a very well-written and seamanlike book. The hero is young Harry Collingwood, the same as the pseudonym of the author. His father has not returned from a previous voyage to sea, and is presumed to be lost. There are also some indications that somewhere in the Pacific there is a “Treasure Island” to be found.

A beautiful and very fast cutter is built. This part of the book is where the author excels, as shipyard work is where he works for his day-to-day bread.

They travel to the Pacific, having various adventures on the way, even to the point of acquiring a charming young lady passenger, with whom the hero falls in love.

We will leave you to find out what happened then, but we can be sure you will enjoy the book.

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