Project Gutenberg's The Loss of the Royal George, by W.H.G. Kingston

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Title: The Loss of the Royal George

Author: W.H.G. Kingston

Illustrator: H.W. Petherick

Release Date: May 9, 2007 [EBook #21405]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Loss of the Royal George, by W.H.G. Kingston.

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A beautifully written but short little book. The actual loss of the
Royal George occurs in a few paragraphs in chapter four, but the whole
of the rest of the book concerns a small child who had been brought on
board the vessel by a lady presumed to be his aunt. The child survives
the accident, but the lady he was with was drowned. The child was
rescued, and was brought up by a crew-member, having a good career in
the Royal Navy. In the last chapter his true parentage is discovered,
and all is made well.

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THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE, BY W.H.G. KINGSTON.

CHAPTER ONE.

My father, Richard Truscott, was boatswain of the _Royal George_, one of
the finest ships in the navy. I lived with mother and several brothers
and sisters at Gosport.

Father one day said to me, "Ben, you shall come with me, and we'll make
a sailor of you. Maybe you'll some day walk the quarter-deck as an
officer."

I did not want to go to sea, and I did not care about being an officer;
indeed I had never thought about the matter, but I had no choice in it.
I was but a very little chap, and liked playing at marbles, or "chuck
penny," in our backyard, better than anything else.

"He is too small yet to be a sailor," said mother.

"He is big enough to be a powder-monkey," observed my father; and as he
was not a man who chose to be contradicted, he the next day took me
aboard his ship, then fitting out in Portsmouth harbour, to carry the
flag of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke. She was indeed a proud ship, with the
tautest masts and the squarest yards of any ship in the British navy.
She carried one hundred an