The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Phantom Ship, by Frederick Marryat

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Title: The Phantom Ship

Author: Frederick Marryat

Release Date: May 22, 2007 [EBook #21573]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHANTOM SHIP ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Phantom Ship, by Captain Marryat.

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Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848.
He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to
writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are
among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still
in print.

Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his
stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he
never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary
genius.

"The Phantom Ship" was published in 1839, the thirteenth book to flow
from Marryat's pen. It is one of his very best books.

This e-text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted
in 2003, and again in 2005.

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THE PHANTOM SHIP, BY CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT.

CHAPTER ONE.

About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the outskirts of the
small but fortified town of Terneuse, situated on the right bank of the
Scheldt, and nearly opposite to the island of Walcheren, there was to be
seen in advance of a few other even more humble tenements, a small but
neat cottage, built according to the prevailing taste of the time. The
outside front had, some years back, been painted of a deep orange, the
windows and shutters of a vivid green. To about three feet above the
surface of the earth, it was faced alternately with blue and white
tiles. A small garden, of about two rods of our measure of land,
surrounded the edifice; and this little plot was flanked by a low hedge
of privet, and encircled by a moat full of water, too wide to be leaped
with ease. Over that part of the moat which was in front of the
cottage-doo