In the Wasp’s Nest: The Story of a Sea Waif in the War of 1812

A story about an infant orphaned and then rescued at sea, who is adopted by the seamen and officers of an American warship in 1800 during the Quasi-War between the Americans and French.  Raised by the combined efforts of a commodore and a common seaman (both actual historical characters), he grows up to become, at age 13, a midshipman in the American Navy during the War of 1812.  These are his adventures, most of which occurred on the famous sloop-of-war Wasp, a real American warship whose history is accurately portrayed in this fictionalized account.  This is an enjoyable novel that contains enough factual accuracy to rival a non-fiction history book.

This novel was published originally in 1902.  This digital version was created from a 1921 hardcover reprint of the novel.

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.