Tom Bowling; A Tale of the Sea: Volumes 1–3 Complete

Frederick Chamier (November 2, 1796–October 29, 1870) is the forgotten giant of nautical fiction and Tom Bowling: A Tale of the Sea is one of the great genre-defining novels about the Age of Sail that he produced; and which later authors, following his formula, are still producing to this day. The narrative here follows an orphan boy who runs away and enlists as a cabin boy on a collier (coal hauler) and from there is luckily pressed by a passing cutter into the British Navy. From there he works his way up to able seaman, then for meritorious service is promoted into midshipman status, and of course eventually becomes the captain of his own ship and a hero of the entire nation.

Published originally in 1841 in three separate volumes, this digital version is complete with all three volumes included. There is a song/poem by the legendary Charles Dibdin titled “Tom Bowling,” which precedes the publishing of this novel by years; it is unclear whether this coincidence signifies that a man by that name actually existed about whom both writers were referring, or Mr. Chamier simply borrowed the name from Dibdin’s song.

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.