Sail Ho!

This appears to be one of Fenn's later novels, and is just as exciting and full of tension as are his earlier ones. The hero is a seventeen-year-old boy called Alison Dale. We have never heard of a boy called Alison before, but this one is pretty tough, and already knew a lot about seamanship even before he went to sea, on account of having often sailed in his father's large yachts.

Hopefully most boys on their first cruise to sea won't have anything like the adventures that befell Master Alison. The skipper was not a pleasant man, and there was a mutiny, led by a nasty piece of work called Jarette, who was half-French.

The story progresses through various degrees of terror, beginning when the ship is taken over by the mutineers, leaving the passengers and officers isolated. Finally most of the latter are cast adrift to die, but leaving two of their number on board. Attempts are made to rescue these.

Eventually the drunken mutineers manage accidentally to set fire to the vessel, and flee it. But the heroic party of officers and passengers come back to recover the missing two, get on board, and manage to put the fire out. This is noticed by the mutineers, who are just over the horizon, and who row back. There is then a good old battle in which eventually Jarette is killed, and life begins to be restored to normal.

The edition used was very difficult to work with. It is a longish book which was squished into less than 160 pages. The pages were large, the typeface was very small, and there were two columns of text per page. There were actually 130 lines of text per page, with the lines being about two-thirds the normal length. However, the Athelstane system of e-book editing was not fazed, and we hope there won't be too many errors found in what we present.

George Manville Fenn lived from 1831 to 1909, and was a prolific writer of boys' adventure stories. He also wrote serialised books for the various boys' periodicals.

The feature that is common to most of his books is the method of sustained suspense that he employed. He wrote, in explaining this, that he relied upon the human desire to unravel a mystery, to retain his readers' attention. He was able to retain their interest right up to the very last page, by building up mysterious and dire situations one upon the other. You are constantly left asking, "How does he get out of this one?" It is just this aspect that makes transcribing his books to e-texts such fun.

George Manville Fenn, English writer of juvenile stories, was born in London January 3, 1831. He was educated at private schools, then attended Battersea Training College for Teachers from 1851 to 1854. He was Master of a small school in Lincolnshire for a time, then became a printer and published a small magazine of poetry, "Modern Metre," in 1862. Two years later he was part owner of the Hertfordshire and Essex Observer, another unsuccessful venture. He then began writing for various periodicals, such as Chamber's Journal and All the Year Round, and was editor of Cassell's Magazine in 1870, and of Once a Week from 1873 to 1879. He soon began to pour out a flood of books for boys, as well as a few novels, many of which were reprinted in America, and before his death he had published between 175 and 200. He was married in 1855 to Susanna Leake, and by her had two sons and six daughters. He died August 26, 1909.

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