The Queen of the Sea; or, Our Lady of the Ocean

The story is about an infamous pirate off the Central American coast whose nature and inclination is not so piratical, who actually comes from a good family but has been forced into a criminal life by circumstances beyond her control—and how she finds redemption, love, and a new life.  And of course, during everything, there is some sailing involved... as should be the case with all novels.

Published originally in 1859, The Queen of the Sea; or, Our Lady of the Ocean: A Tale of Love, Strife and Chivalry was issue numbers 9–12 of the fifth volume of The Weekly Novelette series published by M. M. Ballou in Boston, Massachusetts; each novel of the series being published in four issues over the course of four weeks.  Each issue was priced at four cents, making these “dime novels” cost the reader sixteen cents to read the entirety of a story.  And in addition to that contradiction, at more than 50,000 words The Queen of the Sea is technically a full-sized novel in length, not a novelette.

The listed author of this one, Ned Buntline—a pen name for Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr. (1821–1886)—is a rather famous (or infamous, depending on how you view his personal history) novelist and publisher of the 19th century.  He was so prolific and popular that at one point in his life his writing was bringing him $20,000 per year, a princely sum at that time.

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.