Sail Ho! or, A Boy at Sea, by George Manville Fenn.
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This appears to be one of Fenn's later novels, and is just as exciting
and full of tension as are his earlier ones. The hero is a
seventeen-year-old boy called Alison Dale. We have never heard of a boy
called Alison before, but this one is pretty tough, and already knew a
lot about seamanship even before he went to sea, on account of having
often sailed in his father's large yachts.
Hopefully most boys on their first cruise to sea won't have anything
like the adventures that befell Master Alison. The skipper was not a
pleasant man, and there was a mutiny, led by a nasty piece of work
called Jarette, who was half-French.
The story progresses through various degrees of terror, beginning when
the ship is taken over by the mutineers, leaving the passengers and
officers isolated. Finally most of the latter are cast adrift to die,
but leaving two of their number on board. Attempts are made to rescue
these.
Eventually the drunken mutineers manage accidentally to set fire to the
vessel, and flee it. But the heroic party of officers and passengers
come back to recover the missing two, get on board, and manage to put
the fire out. This is noticed by the mutineers, who are just over the
horizon, and who row back. There is then a good old battle in which
eventually Jarette is killed, and life begins to be restored to normal.
The edition used was very difficult to work with. It is a longish book
which was squished into less than 160 pages. The pages were large, the
typeface was very small, and there were two columns of text per page.
There were actually 130 lines of text per page, with the lines being
about two-thirds the normal length. However, the Athelstane system of
e-book editing was not fazed, and we hope there won't be too many errors
found in what we present.
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