The Dreadnought Boys aboard a Destroyer

Published originally in 1911, this novel written for young adults is the second of six describing the adventures of Ned Strong and Herc Taylor, two rural farm boys, cousins, who decide to leave the farm owned by their parsimonious grandfather who raised them and run off to join the U. S. Navy in the period shortly before the United States decided to enter World War I (1914–1918), known as the “Great War.” The storyline of this second in the series follows the cousins on their first assignment aboard a destroyer. When their destroyer is assigned to monitor a revolution on a Latin American island in the Caribbean, an island which of course has American business interests to protect, the cousins find themselves enmeshed in scouting expeditions, naval battles aboard an island naval warship, and even the climactic land battle between government troops and revolutionaries.

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.