The Penang Pirate

This is a fairly short book, consisting of two short stories.

The first of these, "The Penang Pirate", describes how the Captain of the "Hankow Lin", suspecting that there might be a piratical attack on his vessel on her return voyage from Canton to Australia, lays plans to spoil the pirates' fun. As a result of this the attacking pirate vessel is soundly beaten, but there were some interesting events and confrontations before they actually met the pirate schooner.

The second story is "The Lost Pinnace". HMS London is cruising the East Coast of Africa in search of any slaver dhows. One of these is met with and deleted, so the London, a midshipman with knowledge of the local language having overheard that there is a second slaver not far away, sets off in search of a further conquest.

It was the custom at that time for a ship's pinnace to be left behind under the command of a junior officer whenever the warship left the station on a chase. No junior officer being available the pinnace is left with the bosun in command.

All is well for a time, but there is a severe storm, and the pinnace is lost, several miles from the Madagascar shore. Some of the crew are lost, but the remainder, including the bosun, who is telling the tale years later to a friend back in England, reach the shore. Their journey to the capital of Madagascar is very difficult and dangerous, but most of them get there in the end.

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