The hero of the story is Edward Laurence, an 18-year-old living on a farm in South Africa. The date is in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The boy is sent off on a shopping expedition which will take several days, but when he gets back he finds that there has been an attack on the farm, his father and mother are dead, and all the stock has been taken away. He goes to the neighbouring farm, and finds that the same applies there, except that he realises that the young 12-year old daughter, Nell, has been taken away alive. Edward's father had always spent the profits on improving the breeding-stock, so Edward has very little money in hand. He goes to a town where he has friends, and one of them advises him to spend what he has on setting up an expedition to the north, where he may be able to get enough ivory and hides to make a good profit. And, it is suggested, he may even be able to get gold, silver and diamonds.

Edward sets up this expedition, and sets off. We will not spoil the story for you except to say that he spends some time on the way with a witch-doctor, who is able to conjure up for him a vision of where little Nell is. His adventures thereafter are many and various, and some of them are hair's-breadth escapes from very dangerous situations.

Collingwood is a superb writer, with a magnificent power of description, so it is a very nice book to read or listen to.

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 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