The Island Home

The first American edition was in 1851, and the first British one 1852. James F. Bowman was a Californian journalist, and a very talented one. Eric Quayle, in his book "Ballantyne the Brave" holds that Ballantyne would certainly have read this book at a time, early in his literary career, when he was looking for inspiration for "The Coral Island", which he had contracted to write for Nelsons, the publishers, as the first British edition of "The Island Home" had been published by them. It is true there are some striking similarities, but it is also true that they are both well-written and excellent books.

In the Devil's Dictionary, under the word "Serial", we find that Bowman and another journalist were producing a weekly serial for a newspaper, supposedly a gripping and lurid tale that would go on for ever. At one point the two authors fell out, and when Bowman read what had been published that weekend by his colleague, so that he could get the next episode written during the week, he found that all the dramatis personae had been in a ship that had foundered in mid-Atlantic, with all lives lost. I don't suppose that Bowman was very pleased!

The edition I worked from is the Routledge one, and this, surprisingly, never mentions the name of Bowman, nor Romaunt. The author's name on the cover is Richard Archer, and the subsidiary title is "The Adventures of Six Young Crusoes." The surprising thing is that there were in fact seven, and one of the illustrations shows seven. Very odd!

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. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera 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 TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 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 on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk