This is rather an extraordinary book, because it consists of two rather different eras in the lives of two brothers. In the first the brother Fritz takes part in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and is severely wounded, but survives—just. He is tended by a beauteous maiden, with whom he falls in love.
Meanwhile the brother Eric has gone to sea in what turns out to be a rotten old vessel, which sinks in southern waters. There are some survivors, but Eric is not among them, and is presumed dead.
Fritz departs for America, and is wondering how to get a job. He meets a whaling captain and they are having a chat in a bar when who should appear but Eric, who has had a miraculous rescue, but has never had a chance of writing home. The two brothers decide they will get the whaling ship to drop them off on a very remote island in the South Atlantic, Inaccessible Island, where they will spend a year sealing, and make their fortunes from the skins they get during the year.
There are many vicissitudes, and they do make their fortunes, but not from sealing. There are so many tense situations, so very well described, that the book might almost have come from the pen of George Manville Fenn. A well-written and interesting book, and with a very good description of the Franco-Prussian War, the war which is so often forgotten about.
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
