For any reader wanting to find out more about the real history of colonial Australia, I can recommend any of the following:
Transported: In Place of Death (Convicts in Australia) by Christopher Sweeney (Macmillan, 1981). This is a very readable introduction to the topic of convict transportation in Australia.
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (Vintage, 2003). Although some of its content is controversial, this is an evocative and moving account of Australia’s convict beginnings.
Pig Bites Baby – Stories from Australia’s First Newspaper, Volume 1, 1803–1810 edited by Michael Connor (Duffy and Snellgrove, 2003). A compendium of clippings from The Sydney Gazette, it gives a vivid flavour of life in Sydney in the first decade of the 19th century.
Great Convict Escapes in Colonial Australia by Warwick Hirst (Kangaroo Press, 2003). A rollicking good read, it includes a fascinating chapter on ‘Wild White Men’.
Acknowledgements
I’m very grateful to Dilys Dowswell for her valuable advice on all my first drafts, and my agent Charlie Viney for his support and encouragement. Thanks also to Peter Rayner, Alex and Louis Costello, and Charlie James for their help.
At Bloomsbury, Ele Fountain patiently steered the story in the right direction, and she and Isabel Ford made valuable improvements to the text. Ian Butterworth created the evocative cover and Peter Bailey’s fine line drawings enhance the inside pages.
My trip to Australia to research this book was a wonderful adventure. My landlady, Bobbie Burke, made me very welcome, and Fiona Campbell took me out to visit Richmond and Windsor. On my travels, Ken and Kathy Taylor helped me out when I got lost in the bush, and Lynne Iverson and Stephanie Kaye introducing me to Australian wildlife at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.
Thank you too to Liz Bray, Inara Walden, Karen Bromley and Stephanie Donald for their help and advice. Finally, I’m very grateful to Warwick Hirst, archivist/curator at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, both for the advice he offered when I was researching the book and for his valuable comments on the manuscript.
Also by Paul Dowswell
Powder Monkey
Text copyright © 2006 by Paul Dowswell
Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Peter Bailey
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
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First published in the United States of America in November 2006
by Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children’s Books
Electronic edition published in October 2012
www.bloomsburykids.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dowswell, Paul.
Prison ship : adventures of a young sailor / by Paul Dowswell. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: After being framed for cowardice in a sea battle, thirteen-year-old Sam and his
1. Australia—History—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Australia—History—
19th century—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—19th century—Fiction.
3. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D7598Pr 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2006007275
ISBN 978-1-61963-019-2 (e-book)