At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the coastal parts of Africa were of course well-known, and in any of the territories round the coasts there were European officials, such as consuls, and European traders. This becomes very apparent as you read this book, as many of the travels described involve sorties from an existing European base.

On the other hand the very sources of the various major rivers were not on the map, and the object of many of the travellers was to find these sources, for instance that of the Nile, or rather, that of any one of its major components, such as the Red Nile and the Blue Nile.

On the whole the various regions they passed through had already a settled African regime. In most cases this regime was friendly, but in some cases the opposite was the case. These explorations and travels could only take place if the native rulers could be brought to give assistance, and in most cases this was forthcoming. On the other hand some of the lesser-known early travellers were murdered, and the goods they travelled with stolen. It is really only those travellers who were able to complete their self-imposed tasks, and return to Britain, that have become famous.

Written in an easy style, this book is a good read, and very worth the while of even today's teenagers. There are too many names to make an audiobook very easily, so we have not done so, and have no comments on that.

For your convenience we have split the book into four parts, so the PDFs are not too large. Their size arises from the great number of illustrations, all of which are worth your attention.

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 Kingston’s 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 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