In the last century -- and many centuries before the last; but it is about the eighteenth that I am specially speaking -- long before steamers and railways, or even frigate-built ships and flying coaches were dreamt of, when an Englishman went abroad, he stopped there. When he came back, if at all, it was, as a rule, grizzled and sunburnt, his native habits all unlearnt and his native tongue more than half forgotten. Even the Grand Tour, with all that money could purchase in the way of couriers and post-horses, to expedite matters for my Lord, his chaplain, his courier and his dancing master, took as many years as it now does months to accomplish. There were no young novelists in those days to make a flying-trip to the Gaboon country, to ascertain whether the stories told by former tourists about shooting gorillas were fibs or not. There were no English engineers, fresh from Great George Street, Westminster, writing home to the Athen um to say that they had just opened a branch railway up to Ephesus and that (by the way) they had discovered a pr -Imperial temple of Juno the day before yesterday. This is a tale from before these things -- it is the tale of the Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. I of III. He was a sailor, a soldier, a merchant, a spy, a slave among the moors . . .

Author Biography

George Augustus Henry Sala (1828-1895) was an author and journalist who wrote extensively for the Illustrated London News as G. A. S. and was most famous for his articles and leaders for The Daily Telegraph. He founded his own periodical, Sala's Journal and the Savage Club. The former was unsuccessful but the latter still continues. At an early date he tried his hand at writing and in 1851 attracted the attention of Charles Dickens, who published articles and stories by him in Household Words and subsequently in All the Year Round and in 1856 sent him to Russia as a special correspondent. About the same time he got to know Edmund Yates, with whom in his earlier years, he was constantly connected in his journalistic ventures. In 1860, over his own initials "G.A.S.," he began writing "Echoes of the Week" for the Illustrated London News and continued to do so till 1886, when they were continued in a syndicate of weekly newspapers almost to his death. William Makepeace Thackeray, when editor of the Cornhill, published articles by him on Hogarth in 1860, which were issued in column form in 1866; and in the former year he was given the editorship of Temple Bar, which he held till 1863.