The first edition of this book is dated 1858. The edition used is dated 1858. The publisher was Nelson. The number of pages is 106.

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General information

This book was one of several books written by Ballantyne in or about 1858, for Nelson, the publishers. From a literary point of view it does not rank very high, because it was a “pot-boiler”, and not one of Ballantyne’s dashing and spirited books for teenagers. There were three other books in this category, and we do not rate very high our chances of finding any of them and adding it to our collection.

Much of the book consists of long quotes from the Times correspondent. I am not sure, but I think that should really be read as “the New York Times correspondent”. There are also long letters from the Governor of the area (a British colony), to the British Government, and their answers. Of course there were long intervals between these letters and their replies, because they had to cross the North American continent, and then the Atlantic by sailing vessel.

This book turned up in the Early Canadiana Online collection of early books about Canada, and the scans of the pages to be found on the Canadiana website were acquired using the very new (2005) screen grabbing tool created by ABBYY. Canadiana publish their scans at five different scales, of which we used the middle one, except for the Appendix, where we used the largest size, and OCRed it in the usual manner. The reason for this was that the font size used by Nelsons for the Appendix was much smaller than that used for the bodytext of the book. The rest of the work was done using our Athelstane editing programs, just as we all other books. So doing it was something of a technical feat.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter I.
Richness and Extent of the Gold Fields.

Chapter II.
Climate, Productions, and Soil.

Chapter III.
Routes, etcetera.

Chapter IV.
Description of Coasts, Harbours, etcetera.

Chapter V.
Native Tribes.

Appendix

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