Two Gallant Sons of Devon: A Tale of the Days of Queen BessCollingwood, Harry
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Two Gallant Sons of Devon: A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess
Collingwood, Harry
Adventure and adventurers -- Juvenile fiction; Seafaring life -- Juvenile fiction
At length, everything being ready, the little craft hove up her anchor
and sailed out of the bay on her long voyage round the southern
extremity of America and up through the vast Atlantic ocean. To say
that this voyage, undertaken in so small a vessel, and with a crew of
men who had never before looked upon the sea, was an adventurous one,
full of peril, and marked by countless hairbreadth escapes from capture
and shipwreck, seems superfluous; indeed so full of adventure was it
that a detailed description of what the little vessel and her crew went
through would require a larger volume than the present for its adequate
recital. It must suffice therefore to state that the adventurers
ultimately arrived safely and with their precious cargo intact in
Plymouth Sound, some six months after her departure from the Peruvian
fishing village, to the unbounded astonishment and delight of those who
had long given up Phil and Dick for dead. The meeting with old
friends--and relatives, so far as Dick was concerned--the landing and
eventual disposal of the gems and gold, with every necessary precaution,
must be left for the reader to picture in detail; but it may be
mentioned that while Dick purchased a big estate and built himself
thereon a magnificent mansion not far from Plymouth, speedily becoming
one of Plymouth's most important citizens, using his enormous wealth
wisely and well, and ultimately earning his knighthood for his valiant
conduct in assisting to disperse the Spanish Armada, Phil Stukely was so
enamoured of the idea of returning to Peru, becoming its Inca, and
driving out the Spaniards, that he actually fitted out an expedition
with that intent. How he fared and what ultimately became of him it may
perhaps be the privilege of the present historian some day to relate.
My story of the great and wonderful adventure of Philip Stukely and Dick
Chichester is ended; yet upon reading the pages which I have with so
much labour compiled I am conscious of a certain sense of
incompleteness, conscious that something still remains untold. I feel
that to let the narrative go forth to the world without offering some
sort of an explanation of the source of Stukely's extraordinary and
uncanny knowledge of Indian lore, and of the ancient Peruvian language--
which he had never learned--would be unfair to the reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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