The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer

An excellent book by this accomplished writer of nautical stories for teenagers. The date is 1569. The young George St. Leger arrives back from a cruise in the Bonaventure, owned locally in Plymouth, and shortly after he and his mother are told that his brother has been captured by the Spaniards, somewhere in the West Indies.

A friendly shipbuilder has a new vessel, the Nonsuch, almost ready to sail, and he agrees with George that he will finance a voyage in search of the brother, in return for half of the proceedings of the voyage, for the Nonsuch has been designed as a fast-sailing buccaneer.

The crew are all local Devon men, so much of the dialogue in the book is in a strong Devonian accent, still to be heard in the outlying districts of that beautiful county.

They set off as soon as possible, knowing that the Government might well requisition the Nonsuch. There are plenty of adventures and battles, but eventually the brother is found, but in very dire straits, for he might have died if found only a few minutes later.

There is an interesting and very revealing episode where we are shown how the Spanish Inquisition worked.

Makes a very nice audiobook about eleven hours in length.

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