The Albatross; or, Voices from the Ocean

Published originally in 1849 by H. Hurst & Co., London, this eBook version is transcribed from a republished 1877 edition by George Routledge and Sons in New York. The main storyline follows the adventures of a British warship engaged in the anti-slavery blockade along the East African coastline in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, as they battle weather, slavers, pirates, native Africans, and disease; but the genre of novel in this case is merely a thinly-veiled excuse for a collection of sea stories, some of them harkening back to those stirring battles during the war years. The narrator, you see, Second Lieutenant Walter Fairfield, R.N., is collecting sea stories from his shipmates to be published in a book he decides he will title, “Voices from the Ocean;” which just so happens to be the subtitle of this book.

The author, William Henry Giles Kingston (1814–1880), was the grandson of John Kingston, a staunch abolitionist in Parliament even though he had a plantation on the north coast of South America, so the narrator’s practical and political analyses of the British anti-slavery blockade of Africa in The Albatross are not surprisingly well-informed.

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.