On Board the Esmeralda

There is no doubt that John Hutcheson was a talented writer of books for teenagers. Most of his books were about the sea, but few of them were as well-written as this one. What is meant here is that his English style is very good, even when he brings in characters whose command of English is less perfect; and also that he drives his characters from one gripping situation to another.

The hero, Martin Leigh, is the son of a brave British Naval officer, who was killed in Africa when the boy is very young. The mother also dies, and Martin is left an orphan, to be brought up by his father’s brother. He has a horrible time in this family, and Aunt Matilda is his chief tormentor. Eventually he is sent to a cheap boarding school with a prospectus in no way matched by reality. Again he has a horrible time, for several years, but is befriended by another boy, Tom. One year, on Guy Fawkes’ Day, they perpetrate a misdemeanour far beyond what they should have done, and are sentenced to be expelled. They run away, and stow away in a little coaster. When they are discovered, the captain beats them even worse than the Headmaster of their school had done. So Martin, aged thirteen, has known nothing but hard times.

He meets with nice people, has a while in which he gets his act together, and then goes to sea again. This trip is full of adventure, near misses and disasters. Fire at sea, wrecked on the southern tip of South Anerica, and finally back home to the kind people who had befriended him when he had that early chance to settle down.

It is a well-written book, easy to read or to listen to, and I recommend it as one of Hutcheson’s best.

It has been very hard to find anything about the life of John Conroy Hutcheson. He was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1840, and died in Portsea, England, in late 1896 or early 1897. This was picked up from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He wrote about 18 novels, most, though not all, about the sea.

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 either on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk