Mark Manly; or, The Skipper’s Lad

An action/romance that takes place in Boston, in the years just prior to and then during the American Revolution, as the hero stands up for his inalienable rights, first as a teenage boy and then as a man, all while trying to win the heart of the British governor’s niece.  The story is good but the opening chase scene which takes up most of the first half of the book is this novel’s best feature (especially if you’re a sailor), as Mark Manly and his father, with the governor’s niece aboard, are determined to run the British blockade of Boston harbor in 1775 with their smart-sailing, Boston fishing vessel—of a type nicknamed a “chebacca-boat,” or xebec by proper nautical terminology.  The Flying Fish slides out from beneath cannon on Copp’s Hill, eludes the British flag-ship, then a guard-boat, then Castle William’s cannon fire, and finally is chased by a British Navy sloop.  It’s like the opening chase scene in a Bond film, only better.

Originally published in 1848, when people who participated in the American Revolution were still alive and bearing witness, the author makes the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party seem real and personal, and one wonders how much of these fictional accounts is actually the true story of what happened.

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.