Old Jack, by W.H.G. Kingston.
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This novel is written as a biography of a seaman, whose life at sea
starts as an illiterate boy-seaman, and whose career spans the last
twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first third of the
nineteenth. We learn much of how ships were managed in those days, the
press-gangs, the training, and the life of the common sailor in the
fo'cstle. We experience the life aboard a man-of-war, a merchantman, a
whaler, and even spend a few years ashore among the cannibals of the
Feejee islands. There is a lot of meat in this book (not intended as a
pun), and the reader will finish it with his or her eyes filled with
wonderment. We now give the preface which Kingston himself wrote for
the book.
Preface, by W.H.G. Kingston.
I had more than once, in my rambles in the neighbourhood of Blackheath,
Greenwich and Woolwich, met an old man walking briskly along, whose
appearance struck me as unusual; but we never even exchanged
salutations. One day, however, when I was in company with my friend
Captain N--- of the Navy, seeing the stranger, he stopped and addressed
a few words to him, from which I gleaned that he had been a sailor. My
friend told me, as we moved on, that he often had conversations on
religious subjects with the old man, who had for long been in a South
Sea whaler, and had seen many parts of the world. My interest was much
excited. I took an early opportunity of making the acquaintance of Old
Jack--for such, he told me, was the name by which he was best known; and
without reluctance he gave me his history. This I now present to the
public with certain emendations, with which I do not think my younger
readers will find fault. W.H.G.K.
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