On the Deep; or, The Missionary’s Daughter

A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, On the Deep; or, The Missionary’s Daughter: A Story of the Pacific Ocean is number 14 of the beloved Beadle’s Frontier Series which featured decent writing by some reliable history buffs along with better character development than most nickel weeklies.  This particular issue is a story about the crew and passenger of a merchant ship who battle Malay pirates in the western Pacific after leaving Hawaii—then called the Sandwich Islands—and being disabled by a storm.  And then, after losing their ship and taking to boats, they battle for survival as they attempt to elude both pirates and native islanders.  The subject matter of this issue is a bit out of the ordinary for the Frontier Series, which usually deals with adventures on the western frontier of the continental U. S.

At more than 34,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) 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.