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 bo…
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