This is certainly not a very long book, being about a half to a third of most books of this genre. It starts off with a group of people in a ship's boat, the ship itself having foundered in a typhoon in the Celebes sea. The ship's captain and his two children, the Irish ship's carpenter, and the Malay pilot, are all that finally come to shore, though when the book starts there are a body that has to be thrown overboard, and a seaman who has gone mad and who throws himself there.

Thereafter we are introduced to one natural history topic per chapter, be it a plant, a tree or an animal. There are various perils that have to be overcome--the upas tree, an ourang-outang, a tree that drops its fruit like a heavy bomb, a python, and quite a few more. Luckily they don't meet any unfriendly Dyaks during the journey they undertake to get from their landing-place to the town of Bruni, many hundreds of miles away.

On the whole they are saved by the courage, knowledge and skill of the co-hero, the Malay pilot, who is one of the best in that region with a blow-pipe. He makes himself one, and it is just as well he did, as you will see.

The book is well-written, and as it will only take you five hours or less, you could probably find the time to read it.

REID, Thomas Mayne (1818-83).

Irish writer of boys' stories, born in Ballyroney, County Down. In 1840 he emigrated to New Orleans, settled as a journalist in Philadelphia (1843), and served in the US army during the Mexican war (1847), where he was severely wounded. Returning to Britain in 1849, he settled down to a literary life in London. His vigorous style and hairbreadth escapes delighted his readers. Among his books, many of which were popular in translation in Poland and Russia, were The Rifle Rangers (1850), Scalp Hunters (1851), Boy Hunters (1853), War Trail (1851), Boy Tar (1859), and Headless Horseman (1866). He went back to New York in 1867 and founded the Onward Magazine, but returned to England in 1870.

(With acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary)

The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature mentions that he was the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and that the first two books mentioned above were for a general readership. When he returned to England the publisher Davis Bogue suggested that he should write books specifically for boys, catering for the Christmas market each year. He was a naturalist, and wrote about the creations of Nature, where many other Victorian authors would have been all moralising and pious. He was a great admirer of Byron, and some of his heroes are Byronic in temperament.

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 at www.athelstane.co.uk