This is one of the short but interesting books that Ballantyne wrote with the less well-off members of his readership in mind. All of these were of about 120 pages, and quite small books, that could be sold for only a shilling or two. The hero of many of them is a character called Will Osten, or Wandering Will. In this book he returns from a long trip away, during which his father had died, so his mother was very pleased to see him. But just before he died his father had been left a property in California--it was the time of the Gold Rush. Will gathered some of his friends, and off they went to have a look at this property. So what the book is really about is the life of the miners in the Gold Rush.

Surprise, surprise! A young lady whom Will had met on one of his previous adventures appeared on the scene, on her way back to England. Will is determined to see more of her, but he has no money to pay the exorbitant sum demanded for his fare back to England, so he finds a very quick agent, who finds a very quick lawyer, so that his estate can be sold, and the money raised for the fare. He catches the boat by the skin of his teeth. Of course we will go with him on some more of his wanderings.

Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894), A Short Biography, with acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary.

Scottish author of boys' books, born in Edinburgh, a nephew of James and John Ballantyne, the printers. Educated at The Edinburgh Academy, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1841, and worked as a clerk in the Red River Settlement in the backwoods of northern Canada until 1847, before returning to Edinburgh in 1848. He wrote his first stories on his experiences in Canada, with books such as The Young Fur Traders (1856). Coral Island (1858) is his most famous work.

After that he wrote over eighty books for boys, which were well researched, so that he gained a reputation which led to some of his books being written at the special request of the Post Office, the London Fire Brigade and other Authorities. He wrote marvellous books about the building of such lighthouses as the Eddystone and the Bell Rock. He also spent time aboard the Lightship in the Goodwin Sands, and was able to write a very informative novel about his experiences there. He produced about three books a year right up to the end of his life, but his earlier books are generally thought to be his best ones.

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. 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