The spelling in this book is rather creative (including the occasional
spelling of "ankle" as "ancle"), and the punctuation is remarkably
varied. I have tried to preserve both, except that the spaces between a
word and the following colon or semicolon have been removed. There are
also many French words and phrases, whose meaning will usually be
obvious as soon as you realise they are French. Of course I apologize
for any genuine errors in spelling and punctuation that have crept into
this file.
Captain Gronow is an entertaining raconteur who brings his own
experiences in the Regency period and the wars with France delightfully
to life. Gronow published several sets of memoirs. This file covers
the first half of what he published. Search the web for "Captain
Gronow" to learn more about this interesting gentleman.
The text is arranged as a series of topics, each with a title in
capital letters. Sometimes there is continuity in this arrangement,
sometimes there is not. There is no other structure to the text.
I have used the character for "pounds" (money) in this text: '£'. If
the character in single quotes does not look like a pound sign to you,
well, at least you know what is intended. The book text uses a lower
case 'l' for this purpose, but in computer fonts the 'l', looking just
like a '1' when following a string of digits, is confusing.
Many thanks to Pam Wisniewski for proofreading this text.
--Tobias D. Robison, September, 2001 tdr21@columbia.edu