The King's Own, by Captain Marryat.
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Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848.
He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to
writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are
among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still
in print.
Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his
stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he
never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary
genius.
"The King's Own" was published in 1830, the second book to flow from
Marryat's pen. It is almost as though Marryat was born as a talented
and polished writer. The fact is, though, that for these early books he
was still at sea when most of the work was done, and with lots of time,
since he was engaged in looking for a non-existent, but reported, island
in mid-Atlantic.
This e-text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted
in 2003, and again in 2005.
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