The Albatross by William H. G. Kingston
Price: $3.15
ePublished by
June 2023
Originally published 1849
Fiction, Age of Sail
Author: William H. G. Kingston
ePublished by
June 2023
Originally published 1849
Fiction, Age of Sail
Author: William H. G. Kingston
The Albatross; or, Voices from the Ocean: A Tale of the Sea was published originally in 1849 by H. Hurst & Co., London. This eBook version is transcribed from a republished 1877 edition by George Routledge and Sons in New York. The main storyline follows the adventures of a British warship engaged in the anti-slavery blockade along the East African coastline in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, as they battle weather, slavers, pirates, native Africans, and disease; but the genre of novel in this case is merely a thinly-veiled excuse for a collection of sea stories, some of them harkening back to those stirring battles during the war years. The narrator, you see, Second Lieutenant Walter Fairfield, R.N., is collecting sea stories from his shipmates to be published in a book he decides he will title, “Voices from the Ocean;” which just so happens to be the subtitle of this book.
The author, William Henry Giles Kingston (1814–1880), was the grandson of John Kingston, a staunch abolitionist in Parliament even though he had a plantation on the north coast of South America, so the narrator’s practical and political analyses of the British anti-slavery blockade of Africa in The Albatross are not surprisingly well-informed.
The author, William Henry Giles Kingston (1814–1880), was the grandson of John Kingston, a staunch abolitionist in Parliament even though he had a plantation on the north coast of South America, so the narrator’s practical and political analyses of the British anti-slavery blockade of Africa in The Albatross are not surprisingly well-informed.