The Voyage of Commodore Anson Round the World

George Anson’s famous voyage around the world, perhaps the greatest example of perseverance in the face of adversity in naval history, began in September of 1740 and ended in 1744.  In 1748, an account of this incredible voyage—A Voyage Round the World, In the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV., by George Anson, Esq., Commander in Chief of a Squadron of His Majesty’s Ships, sent upon an Expedition to the South-Seas—compiled from his personal papers and subscribed to by hundreds of gentlemen across England, was published under his direction by one Richard Walter, M. A.  It’s a fascinating account although rather longish and torturously detailed—it takes twelve pages just to list the subscribers and a whole chapter to list the equipment acquired by the fleet before setting sail.  Consequently, that 1748 version is a tough slog for a reader who just wants the meat of the story.

In 1825, seventy seven years after the original account was published (and presumably after any danger of violating the Anson or Walter family’s copyrights had expired), this condensed version was published in Ireland.  Avoiding tedious lists of subscribers, men, and equipment, the anonymous author of this shorter book tells the same fascinating story in less than a quarter the space.  It’s like the Reader’s Digest version a century before Reader’s Digest existed... only not quite because this is essentially a re-telling of the story, in different words entirely.

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.