In all the days that men have walked the earth -- long before steamers and railways, or even frigate-built ships and flying coaches were dreamt of, when an Englishman went abroad, he stopped there. Thirty years ago, it is possible the estimable King of Arms might have thought a mail-coach journey to York a somewhat serious expedition, yet he took the P. and O. Boat for Stamboul as blithely as though he were bound for a water-party at Greenwich. If an Emperor is to be crowned in Russia, or Prussia, or Crim Tartary, all the London newspapers dispatch special correspondents to the scene of the pageant. Mr. Reuter will soon have completed his Overland Telegraph to China. At Liverpool they call New York "over the way." The Prince of Wales's travels in his nonage have made Telemachus a tortoise, and the young Anacharsis a stay-at-home. Married couples spend their honeymoon hippopotamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile. And the Traveler's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the candidates put up for election, because nowadays almost every tolerably educated Englishman has traveled more than six hundred miles in a straight direction from the British Metropolis.
This is a tale from before these things -- it is the tale of the Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. III of III. He was a sailor, a soldier, a merchant, a spy, a slave among the moors . . .
Author Biography
George Augustus Henry Sala (1828-1895) was an author and journalist who wrote extensively for the Illustrated London News as G. A. S. and was most famous for his articles and leaders for The Daily Telegraph. He founded his own periodical, Sala's Journal and the Savage Club. The former was unsuccessful but the latter still continues. At an early date he tried his hand at writing and in 1851 attracted the attention of Charles Dickens, who published articles and stories by him in Household Words and subsequently in All the Year Round and in 1856 sent him to Russia as a special correspondent. About the same time he got to know Edmund Yates, with whom in his earlier years, he was constantly connected in his journalistic ventures. In 1860, over his own initials "G.A.S.," he began writing "Echoes of the Week" for the Illustrated London News and continued to do so till 1886, when they were continued in a syndicate of weekly newspapers almost to his death. William Makepeace Thackeray, when editor of the Cornhill, published articles by him on Hogarth in 1860, which were issued in column form in 1866; and in the former year he was given the editorship of Temple Bar, which he held till 1863.
