There was a state of war between Chili and Peru in the 1870s. It was all to do with a desert area that lay between Chili, Peru and Bolivia. At first this desert was not particularly claimed by any of these countries, but when it was discovered that it held rich reserves of nitrates, the three of them fell out.

Two young Englishmen, with sea-going experience, were aboard a British vessel trading in nitrates and other ores. The captain was a very disagreeable character, and they determined to leave him, and sign up with the Chilian authorities for employment in the Chilian Navy, which was short of officers. They were taken on, and the rest of the book details some of the adventures they had, and the trials and tribulations they endured.

This is a very exciting and enjoyable book. There are a few Spanish words, and of course the ships have Spanish names, but you soon get used to that. I fully recommend it, especially if you can make it into an audiobook.

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 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 here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk