Captain Dangerous, Volume 3 Of 3 — George Augustus Sala

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 . . .