Ben Brace, The Last of Nelson’s Agamemnons

Frederick Chamier (November 2, 1796–October 29, 1870) is the forgotten giant of nautical fiction and Ben Brace is one of the greatest novels of the Age of Sail ever written.  The narrative follows an ordinary British seaman through the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars, and then into retirement.  Published originally in 1836, this digital version is created from an 1880 American re-print by T. B. Peterson & Brothers of Philadelphia, to which we have added chapter titles and additional illustrations.  The title character, Ben Brace, is loosely based on Admiral Nelson’s long-time servant, Tom Allen, from whom many of the anecdotes and stories in this novel were acquired by Chamier when he interviewed the retired seaman in Greenwich Hospital.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.