Picked up at Sea

This is good book, well written, and interesting throughout. It starts off at sea, aboard the Susan Jane, when a piece of floating wreckage is seen. A body is found on it, that of a boy of fifteen or so, badly injured, and struck dumb, and apparently unaware of what is going on. Yet when Seth, one of the men on board, is in danger, the boy springs to his aid. When they get to America it is time for the vessel to have a full refit, so some of the crew and the only passenger, Mr. Rawlings, together with the boy, now known as Sailor Bill, go off to work a mine that Rawlings has bought.

Eventually, after all sorts of adventures and misadventures, the boy recovers his senses, and recognises a man and a dog in the camp as old family friends. The dog, of course, had previously mystified the camp by apparently recognising the boy, but this had been put down to a doggy sympathy with those not so well mentally endowed.

The mine is successful, and all go home as wealthy as they could wish.

Here we are working from the first edition, while some later editions had only the above story. There are actually three further stories, all with a nautical flavour, but totalling only half the length of the first story. They are also interesting, and it is sad that they got left out from those later editions. You will enjoy them, either to read or in the spoken form.

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