The first edition of this book is dated 1860. The edition used is dated 1907. The publisher was George Routledge and Sons, London. The number of pages is 309.

General information

This is a really extraordinary book, especially when you consider that the author was the first to write in the Wild West genre, and was also no mean naturalist. It is true that he did write a few books with a sea setting, much like those by other nautical authors. But this book, although the setting for most of the book is inside the cargo hold of a merchant vessel, doesn’t really fit into any of Reid’s usual genres.

The young hero is a very little lad, no more than four feet high. He has friends among the other boys of the village, but none of them seem to get up to his sort of escapades. One of these involves stowing away in the hold of a vessel bound for Peru, six months’ voyage away. He stowed away, as he thought, just before she sailed, but what he didn’t realise was that there was a great deal of last-minute cargo yet to be loaded. When the ship finally sailed he found that he was right at the bottom of a huge amount of cargo. Luckily he found that there were some boxes of biscuits nearby, and, luckily also, some water casks. He works out that he might be able to survive the six months on these supplies. What he didn’t reckon on were the rats, who soon deprived him of the biscuits. It then became imperative to get out.

The next forty chapters, no less, detail the painstaking way in which, armed only with a good knife, which eventually breaks and has to be repaired somehow, and in the dark, remember, he makes his way through layer after layer of cargo; through brandy casks, pianos, boxes of ladies’ bonnets; and all this in a hold whose shape made it harder and harder the more he mounted towards the cargo hatch. This a very gripping tale, faultlessly written, and very hard to put down. Unlike other tales of the sea nobody gets killed, though some of the rats have to go, even being eaten as the boy’s hunger mounts.

Of course it does have a happy ending, but not many of us could have done what he did, and certainly not many little chaps only four feet in height. Makes a superb audiobook.