Across the Spanish Main

This book, of average length, is set at the end of the sixteenth century, when the English were in a state of war against the Spanish. The heroes of the story are two boys from Devon, a county in the south-west of England. They set off with a view to repairing the fortunes of the family of one of them, by chasing and capturing Spanish treasure ships.

Their adventures are many and various, and include being captured by a famous pirate. They are also, later on in the book, condemned to be burnt to death by the Inquisition. Luckily they are able to escape this disagreeable outcome.

They also come across a cryptogram, which is rather difficult to solve, but which eventually they manage to decypher, and which leads them to the treasure hoarded by the pirate, who by that time has met his end.

This is a good book, and one which makes a very nice audiobook.

Harry Collingwood (1851-1922). Pseudonym of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster, a civil engineer who specialised in seas and harbours.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used ABBYY Finereader8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk