Afloat and Ashore with Sir Walter Raleigh

This biography, published originally in 1876 and re-published here in digital form, describes the life and career of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), “one of the most remarkable and accomplished Englishmen of his day; a man of varied and versatile gifts, an accomplished courtier, a successful captain both by land and sea, an erudite scholar, a profound thinker, and an eloquent author.”  This great man’s cruel treatment and eventual beheading by the small-minded and vindictive King James will remain a stain on his name and a stain on the reputation of the nation forever.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their foulest hour.’”

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.