The King of the Sea: A Tale of the Fearless and Free

A young toddler is kidnapped by a pirate who later rises to become the leader, or “king,” of an island of pirates and their families.  Upon this pirate’s death, when his adopted son is chosen to inherit this leadership role and become the new “King of the Sea,” the young man’s lifestyle is suddenly thrown into conflict with his natural inclinations—and at that moment his real father miraculously re-appears in his life.  And of course, during everything, there is sailing involved... as should be the case with all novels.

Published originally in 1860, The King of the Sea; A Tale of the Fearless and Free was issue numbers 19–22 of the sixth volume of The Weekly Novelette series published by M. M. Ballou in Boston, Massachusetts; each novel of the series being published in four issues over the course of four weeks.  Each issue was priced at four cents, making these “dime novels” cost the reader sixteen cents to read the entirety of a story.  And in addition to that contradiction, at more than 49,000 words The King of the Sea is technically a full-sized novel in length, not a novelette.

The listed author of this one, Ned Buntline—a pen name for Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr. (1821–1886)—is a rather famous (or infamous, depending on how you view his personal history) novelist and publisher of the 19th century.  He was so prolific and popular that at one point in his life his writing was bringing him $20,000 per year, a princely sum at that time.

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.