Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life

A 74,000-plus-word novel about colonists in New Zealand.  The Treaty of Waitangi between the United Kingdom and the Maoris was signed in 1840, giving sovereignty over the islands to the former.  The events in this novel, published originally in 1881, occur in the 1860s as the inrush of Europeans was ramping up.  Almost everybody was a newcomer busy forming, and finding their way in, the newly-forming nation.

The story starts in England with the young hero about to embark for New Zealand, follows him through his journey around the world, his arrival in Dunedin, New Zealand—then a brand new and much smaller municipality recently invigorated by the discovery of gold in nearby “Muttontown”—and finally his arrival at his pre-arranged work assignment on the Waitaruna homestead where he learns his new trade as a sheep farmer, discovers the beauty of New Zealand, endures tragedy, and, ultimately, wins the love of the woman who will become his wife.

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.