Privateer's Voyage Round the World (Seafarers' Voices) Hardcover George Shelvocke (Seaforth Publishing)

You can't fault this book on slickness. It's beautifully edited and presented.

Unfortunately, it's wicked condensed. Over half of the verbiage has been edited out. This edition reads nice and easy, you could probably read the whole thing in 3 or 4 sittings. So, for today's modern now-a-go-go person this may be just the ticket.

For people with other criteria this may be just the ticket, but for me it was so light and fluffy it gave me gas, so to speak. When I read these old 18th century books I want to become immersed in the pre-industrial, 18th century mentality, and this edition only marginally does that. Fortunately, the PDF for the original 1726 edition is available on-line, long-s's and all. I may very well read that, just to compare. I did compare the beginning of each edition and was stunned at how they reduced 3 pages of the original to a small half-paragraph in this edition.

The story itself is pretty interesting and action-packed. Shelvocke frequently runs down his fellow officers which is pretty amusing. Come to think of it, he basically runs down everybody, his officers, his crew, the Chinese. The only people he doesn't dump on are the Indians they meet on the coast of Baja California.

There's a confusing discontinuity in the naming of his ship about half way through, I don't know if that's the editor's fault or Shelvocke's. Their original ship, the Speedwell, gets wrecked on the island of Juan Fernandez and they eventually replace it but capturing another ship which they rename the Happy Return. But when they meet up with their old consort, the Success, all of a sudden Shelvocke starts calling his ship the Speedwell again. An end note would have helped to clear this up.

Due to the shipwreck he has to leave about 30 of his crew marooned on Juan Fergandez and there's no follow up info about what happened to them which is a little disturbing, as if they were just expendable working men.

The introduction is pretty nice and informative and it does a good job of running down Shelvocke himself, which makes perfect sense.

This book is part of new series of books of first person narratives from the old seafaring days and I imagine they've all had this glossy, breezy condensing done to them so I will be steering clear of them.