The Island Treasure, by John Conroy Hutcheson

Starting with excuses, this book was rather hard to transcribe to digital format. It was unevenly printed on a rather rough paper, so that many words were hard to read, even to the naked eye. Several of the characters in the book spoke in their own dialect or with a heavy foreign accent, so that many of the words in the book were not words in the English language. And if that were not all the copy used was somewhat spotted. But we seem to have come though those trials, and we present a very readable book.

Another strange matter with the book was that the title on the cover, on the title page, and at the start of the first chapter was “The Island Treasure”, while thereafter every even-numbered page is headed “The Black Man’s Ghost”, which is the title under which the book was copyrighted.

The story is told from the viewpoint of a young cabin-boy, who had run away to sea from a good vicarage home. There is a most unpleasant captain, from the American “Down-East”. The first-mate is pretty nasty too, while the second-mate has a very strong Danish accent, but is a good man, as is the ship’s carpenter. The ship’s cook, a black man from Jamaica, is the protagonist, the ghost.

The ship is wrecked intact on Abingdon Island in the Galapagos, being carried ashore by a tsunami. There is a lot of treasure on the island, dating from the buccaneerss time. We will take you no further into the story, but it is well told, and makes a good read and a good listen.