The Secret Chart; or, Treasure Hunting in Hayti by James Otis

 

The Secret Chart or Treasure Hunting in Haiti by James Otis

Written for younger men, but thoroughly engaging for the whole family, this is the tale of two young men and crew who travel the Carribean in search of a trasure, and encounter many adventures along the way.

Kaler was born on March 19, 1848, in Winterport, Maine. He attended public schools, then got a job with the Boston Journal at 13, and three years later was providing coverage of the American Civil War. Later, he went on to work as a journalist or editor for various newspapers, superintendent at schools, and a publicity man at a circus.

In 1880 he wrote his first, and still most famous (largely by way of a filmed version by Walt Disney), children’s book, Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, a story about an orphan who runs away to join the circus. Following the book's success he went on to author numerous other children’s books, mostly historical and adventure novels. Like most writers of his era, he was astonishingly prolific, and a total of nearly 200 books by him have been identified. Most were signed with the Otis name, but he also used the pen names Walter Morris, Lt. James K. Orton, Harry Prentice, and Amy Prentice. (Some scholars believe that the latter books, which were aimed at a younger audience than most of his works, were in fact penned by his wife.

After spending several years in the southeastern states, he returned to Maine in 1898 to become the first superintendent of schools in South Portland. A school named in his honor still stands in that city. He married Amy L. Scamman on March 19 of that year, and they had two sons, Stephen and Otis. Kaler died of uremia on December 11, 1912, in Portland, Maine.

Air Monster by Edwin Green

 Air Monster by Edwin Green 

This is a thrilling mystery and adventure tale written for boys, ages 9 to about 15. A story of the world’s largest dirigible and of the dangers in the frozen wastes of the Arctic—a combination sure to provide thrills for every reader. What befalls this “Air Monster” on the Arctic trip is only a part of the smashing action of this great book for boys.

Agincourt by G. P. R. James

 

Agincourt by G. P. R. James 

A historical adventure and romance, set at the historic battle of Agincourt, involving the French and English.

In the long slog of the Hundred Years' War, the English forces' decisive victory in the Battle of Agincourt proved to be a key turning point. In this gripping historical novel from G. P. R. James, a tender human drama unfolds against the backdrop of the epic battle.

After London by Richard Jefferies

 

After London by Richard Jefferies

After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. Beginning with a loving description of nature reclaiming England -- fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland -- the rest of the story is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it.

Jefferies’ novel can be seen as an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction. After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.

The first part, The Relapse into Barbarism, is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England. The second part, Wild England, is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

 

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of racial slurs.".

Adrift in the Wilds by Edward S. Ellis

 

Adrift in the Wilds by Edward S. Ellis

A thrilling tale written for boys and teens aged 13-18, but quite a thrilling read for the entire family.

Edward Sylvester Ellis was an American author who was born in Ohio, and died at Cliff Island, Maine. He served as editor of Public Opinion (a daily newspaper), Golden Days and Holiday (both children's magazines). He specialized in boys' stories, inspirational biography, and history for both children and adults. He was a major author during the era of inexpensive fiction of the nineteenth century (dime novels). 

Adrift in the Ice Fields by Charles W. Hall

Adrift in the Ice Fields by Charles W. Hall

To open to the youth of America a knowledge of some of the winter sports of our neighbors of the maritime provinces, with their attendant pleasures, perils, successes, and reverses, the following tale has been written. It does not claim to teach any great moral lesson, or even to be a guide to the young sportsman; but the habits of all birds and animals treated of here have been carefully studied, and, with the mode of their capture, have been truthfully described. It attempts to chronicle the adventures and misadventures of a party of English gentlemen, during the early spring, while shooting sea-fowl on the sea-ice by day, together with the stories with which they whiled away the long evenings, each of which is intended to illustrate some peculiar dialect or curious feature of the social life of our colonial neighbors. Later in the season the breaking up of the ice carries four hunters into involuntary wandering, amid the vast ice-pack which in winter fills the great Gulf of St. Lawrence. Their perils, the shifts to which they are driven to procure shelter, food, fire, medicine, and other necessaries, together with their devious drift and final rescue by a sealer, are used to give interest to what is believed to be a reliable description of the ice-fields of the Gulf, the habits of the seal, and life on board of a sealing steamer. It would seem that the world had been ransacked to provide stories of adventure for the boys of America; but within the region between the Straits of Canso and the shores of Hudson's Bay there still lie hundreds of leagues of land never trodden by the white man's foot; and the folk-lore and idiosyncrasies of the population of the Lower Provinces are almost as unknown to us, their near neighbors. The descendants of emigrants from Bretagne, Picardy, Normandy, and Poitou, still retaining much of their ancient patois, costume, habits, and superstitions; the hardy Gael, still ignorant of any but the language of Ossian and his burr-tongued Lowland neighbors; the people of each of Ireland's many counties, clinging still to feud, fun, and their ancient Erse tongue, together with representatives from every English shire, and the remnants of Indian tribes and Esquimaux hordes,--offer an opportunity for study of the differences of race, full of picturesque interest, and scarcely to be met with elsewhere. The century which has with us almost realized the apostolic announcement, "Old things are passed away; behold, all things have become new," with them has witnessed little more than the birth, existence, and death of so many generations, and the old feuds and prejudices of race and religion, little softened by the lapse of time, still remain with their appropriate developments, in the social life of the scattered peoples of these northern shores. Regretting that the will to depict those life-pictures has not been better seconded by more skill in word-painting, the author lays down his pen, hoping that the pencil of the artist will atone, in some degree, for his own "many short-comings." By Charles W. Hall.

Adrift in the City by Horatio Alger

 

Adrift in the City by Horatio Alger

Another tale for young men about how one young man achieves success and sefl-esteem.

Horatio Alger Jr. January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American writer, best known for his many young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the "rags-to-riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age.

All of Alger's juvenile novels share essentially the same theme, known as the "Horatio Alger myth": a teenage boy works hard to escape poverty. Often it is not hard work that rescues the boy from his fate but rather some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a wealthy individual.

Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 with the publication of his fourth book, Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. This novel was a huge success. His many books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured casts of stock characters: the valiant hard-working, honest youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil, greedy squire.

In the 1870s, Alger's fiction was growing stale. His publisher suggested he tour the American West for fresh material to incorporate into his fiction. Alger took a trip to California, but the trip had little effect on his writing: he remained mired in the tired theme of "poor boy makes good." The backdrops of these novels, however, became the American West rather than the urban environments of the northeastern United States.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Alger's moral tone coarsened with the change in boys' tastes. Sensational thrills were wanted by the public. The Protestant work ethic had loosened its grip on America, and violence, murder, and other sensational themes entered Alger's works. Public librarians questioned whether his books should be made available to the young. They were briefly successful, but interest in Alger's novels was renewed in the first decades of the 20th century, and they sold in the thousands. By the time he died in 1899, Alger had published around a hundred volumes. He is buried in Natick, Massachusetts. Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has awarded scholarships and prizes to deserving individuals.

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Adrian Savage by Lucas Malet

 

Adrian Savage by Lucas Malet.

This is a rousing romane and tale of coming of age adventure.

Adrian Savage—a noticeably distinct, well-groomed, and well-set-up figure, showing dark in the harsh light of the winter afternoon against the pallor of the asphalt—walked rapidly across the Pont des Arts, and, about half-way along the Quai Malaquais, turned in under the archway of a cavernous porte-cochère. The bare, spindly planes and poplars, in the center of the courtyard to which this gave access, shivered visibly. Doubtless the lightly clad, lichen-stained nymph to whom they acted as body-guard would have shivered likewise had her stony substance permitted, for icicles fringed the lip of her tilted pitcher and caked the edge of the shell-shaped basin into which, under normal conditions, its waters dripped with a not unmusical tinkle. Yet the atmosphere of the courtyard struck the young man as almost mild compared with that of the quay outside, along which the northeasterly wind scourged bitingly. Upon the farther bank of the turgid, gray-green river the buildings of the Louvre stood out pale and stark against a sullen backing of snow-cloud. For the past week Paris had cowered, sunless, in the grip of a black frost. If those leaden heavens would only elect to unload themselves of their burden the weather might take up! To Adrian Savage, in excellent health and prosperous circumstances, the cold in itself mattered nothing—would, indeed, rather have acted as a stimulus to his chronic appreciation of the joy of living but for the fact that he had to-day been suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to leave Paris and bid farewell to one of its inhabitants eminently and even perplexingly dear to him. Having, for all his young masculine optimism, the artist's exaggerated sensibility to the aspects of outward things, and equally exaggerated capacity for conceiving—highly improbable—disaster, it troubled him to make his adieux under such forbidding meteorologic conditions. His regrets and alarms would, he felt, have been decidedly lessened had kindly sunshine set a golden frame about his parting impressions. 

This EPUB is readable on all devices and on every web browser on every computer and cell phone. Kindle, Nook, Ipod, Ipad, Android, Windows, and Mac all support this format. This EPUB has no encryption, so one can safely and easily move it from one device to another, or share it with others. This ebpub is perfectly viewable on any Android device as well.

Abandoned by Jules Verne

 

Abandoned by Jules Verne

Sequel, in a way, to The Mysterious Island, though this stands alone as an adventure novel in its own right.

Never Fire First by James French Dorrance

Never Fire First by James French Dorrance

 Adventure and Western novel involving troopers of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police.

 

Love in the Jungle by May Freud Dickerson

 

Love in the Jungle by May Freud Dickerson

Thrilling tale of a young lady trapped alone in the jungles in India, where she is chased by a mad man, and finally is saved by her father, only to find that she can not stay with the man most dear to her.  Then she is dragged many miles away from him to lead a new life, leaving behind a man she met and whom she truly loved.  Set in India at the turn of the last century, this is a thrilling novel of love, adventure, and hope.

A Young Hero Fighting to Win by Edward S. Ellis

 

A Young Hero Fighting to Win by Edward S. Ellis

A tale in the vein of Horatio Alger's stories of young men facing challenges.  Great reading for young men who crave adventure and suspense. Three short stories by other authors as an added bonus:

A Year in a Yawl by Russell Doubleday

 

A Year in a Yawl by Russell Doubleday.

A thrilling true adventure of young men who built a yawl and went for a long voyage in it.  Outstanding tale, hard to put down!

This EPUB is readable on all devices and on every web browser on every computer and cell phone. Kindle, Nook, Ipod, Ipad, Android, Windows, and Mac all support this format. This EPUB has no encryption, so one can safely and easily move it from one device to another, or share it with others.

A Yankee Girl at Antietam by Alice Turner Curtis

 

A Yankee Girl at Antietam by Alice Turner Curtis

A tale of the Civil War battle at Antietam, as seen through the eyes of a young Yankee woman.  Great reading for young ladies and young men as well.  Adults will find it enthralling as well.

A Yankee Flier in the Far East by Al Avery

 

A Yankee Flier in the Far East by Al Avery

A thrilling tale of flying and adventure, written for younger men, but thoroughly enjoyable by all.

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A Woman of the Ice Age by L. P. Gratacap

 

A Woman of the Ice Age by L. P. Gratacap 

Aa novel of romance and adventure, taking place 50,000 years ago, as early man struggled to understand themselves and the world around them.

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Masterman Ready by Frederick Marryat

The genteel Mr. Seagrave, the frequently indisposed Mrs. Seagrave and their four children: William, twelve, Tommy, six, Caroline 7 and Albert who is not yet one, sail on board the Pacific en route to the Seagrave's home in Australia. The Pacific runs into several storms and when the captain is struck unconscious, the ship's crew abandon the ship wholesale with the exception of the selfless Masterman Ready who elects to remain onboard the doomed vessel to help the Seagraves and their negro maid, Juno. Eventually, the weather clears and the prescient Ready leads the Seagraves to relative safety on a desert island where they seek food and shelter, survive several adventures and are even attacked by natives.

 

A Monk of Fife by Andrew Lang

A Monk of Fife is a fictitious narrative purporting to be written by a young Scot in France from 1429 to 1431, During the time of Joan of Arc.

 

A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.

This is the thrilling classic tale by Jules Verne about a voyage to the center of the earth, where a lost civilization is found.

 

 

The genre of subterranean fiction already existed long before Verne. However, Journey considerably added to the genre's popularity and influenced later such writings. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs explicitly acknowledged Verne's influence on his own Pellucidar series.  The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.

A Son of the State by W. Pett Ridge

 

A Son of the State by W. Pett Ridge

A sprawling tale of love and adventure, politics and suspense, mystery and thrilling detail

A Son of the Soil by Margaret Oliphant

 

A Son of the Soil by Margaret Oliphant

5-year-old Colin Campbell has grown up on his parents' farm, Ramore, on the beautiful Holy Loch; and soon he will be attending Glasgow University to study for the ministry. By chance he saves the life of a young man, Harry, the son of Sir Thomas Frankland. The two boys do not like each other, but the result is that Colin is occasionally invited to the Castle and falls in love with a witty, flirtatious girl, Matty, whose place in the social order is far above his.

We follow him through his adventures at University, and as a summer tutor at a great house, where once again he is thrown into Matty's company. Throughout this novel are long, metaphysical discussions between Colin and his even more serious friend Lauderdale regarding Christianity and the Kirk of Scotland. Later he makes a foolish decision in the hope of being near Matty.  

A Son of Courage by Archie P. McKishnie

 

A Son of Courage by Archie P. McKishnie

A Tom Saywer type of tale taking place in Nova Scotia.

 

A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton

A worrisome tale of a woman who has a son in the front lines of the War during World War I.  There are more novels by Edith Whaton HERE.

 

A Sicilian Romance

A unique, historical Gothic romance of a man visiting Sicily, where he learns of the strange events surrounding a certain family.  He investigates, and falls in love in this suspenseful, Gothic romance.

A Sicilian Romance is a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe. It was her second published work, and was first published anonymously in 1790.

The plot concerns the fallen nobility of the house of Mazzini, on the northern shore of Sicily, as related by a tourist who learns of their turbulent history from a monk he meets at the ruins of their once-magnificent castle. The Mazzini sisters, Emilia and Julia are 'beautiful' young ladies with many talents. Julia quickly falls in love with the young and handsome Italian count Hippolitus de Vereza, but to her dismay her father decides that she should marry Duke de Luovo instead. After much thought Julia attempts to elope with Hippolitus on the night before her wedding. However, their escape had been anticipated, and the Marquis, Julia's father, ambushes and seemingly kills Hippolitus whose body is carried away by his servants. The Marquis tells Julia that she must marry the duke and after much difficulty she escapes again alone. The Marquis and the Duke spend much of the novel trying to catch Julia and force her to marry the duke. Julia has to flee from her various hiding places as she narrowly avoids capture and eventually ends up, by a secret tunnel, in the abandoned and seemingly haunted southern apartments of the Mazzini castle only to find that her mother, thought to be dead, had been imprisoned there for years by the Marquis, who had grown to despise her. The Marquis's new wife, Maria de Vellorno, commits murder-suicide after the Marquis discovers and accuses her of infidelity, poisoning the Marquis and stabbing herself. Before he dies the Marquis confesses to Ferdinand, his son, that his mother has been imprisoned, and hands him the keys. However, his mother and Julia had already been freed by Hippolitus, who had recovered from his wounds. Ferdinand then finds them at a lighthouse on the coast, waiting to leave for Italy, and they are all joyfully reunited. The introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition notes that in this novel "Ann Radcliffe began to forge the unique mixture of the psychology of terror and poetic description that would make her the great exemplar of the Gothic novel, and the idol of the Romantics". The novel explores the "cavernous landscapes and labyrinthine passages of Sicily's castles and convents to reveal the shameful secrets of its all-powerful aristocracy" .