Navy cloth binding with orange and green title, diver and eels on the front board.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

STORY OF AERIAL AND SUBMARINE PERIL AND ADVENTURE But this story is, well, science fiction. Never mind that the scient fictional historians would like to tell you that Hugo Gernsback invented the genre in the late 1920s, modeling it around classic works of Wells and Verne, and that Harry Collingwood only lived until 1922, it’s still science fiction. Submarine-airships, made of some phantasmic material called aetherium, and travel from the North Pole to Africa to Mount Everest.

Harry Collingwood was the pseudonym of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster (23 May 1843 – 10 June 1922), a British civil engineer and novelist who wrote over 40 boys’ adventure books, almost all of them in a nautical setting.

Sutherland states of Collingwood that “His most enduring monument is that his yacht Swallow inspired his friend Arthur Ransome’s children’s book Swallows and Amazons.” However, Ransome did not write the book until 1929 – seven years after Collingwood’s death. The Swallow that served as Ransome’s inspiration was the sailboat belonging to W. G. Collingwood, who was no relation.

Ransome learned to sail, at age 12, in W. G. Collingwood’s boat Swallow at Coniston in 1896. He then repaid the favour by teaching W. G. Collingwood’s grandchildren, the five Altouyans, to sail in “Swallow II” in 1928.