Two Adventurers in Search of El Dorado

Rather strangely the book starts off with an incident very closely resembling the loss of the "Titanic", which had occurred a few years before the publication of this book. This episode, the sinking due to collision with ice of the "Everest", is well told, and must indeed give a good picture of what had happened with the "Titanic".

As a result of this our two heroes find themselves on an ice floe, from which they are rescued, and become great friends. They decide to go together to South America, to see what adventures befall them. Several interesting episodes are described, but eventually they find themselves outside what appears to be a city of gold, but down in a former crater with no apparent means of access. Eventually they do find the way down, and to their surprise, Earle, the American, who was wearing an amulet he had found earlier in the trip, was treated with great reverence as a God. All this is exceptionally well-told, and you will certainly enjoy the book.

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 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 here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk