Adventures of Marshall Vavasour, Midshipman

Published originally in 1873, this is a story about a young boy coming of age in the British Navy during the Age of Sail, but, unusually for Age of Sail novels, this one takes place after the Napoleonic Wars are through.  Most of the great battles of the British Navy are in the past when this story starts in the 1820s, and steamships are well on their way to replacing the great sailing ships when the eponymous hero heads back to England—on a steamship—at the end.  Still, the reader does get to vicariously experience the British Navy attacking Acre in 1840, forty one years after Napoleon failed there, and the British Navy’s battle against the slave trade along Africa’s west coast.

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.