When my own boy and girls, who call me “Daddy,” read any of my books at home—and I am proud to say they all do—a question almost invariably asked is: “But do tell us, is it all true?”
I answer as best I can.
Now, no tale in the world is ever “all true”: it would not be a story if it were, would it?
Nevertheless I have knocked about all over the world so much, and made so many notes and observations, that I have my imagination to fall back upon less often than if I had stayed by the fireside all my life.
Now I want to tell you right away, that most of my people or heroes in this story have had their prototypes, and I have tried to paint them from the life.
The terrible Indian Mutiny was before my time in the service. I was not there, but the weird little Antonio Garcia I met afterwards at Bombay and elsewhere, and his mysterious glass eye was precisely as I have tried to depict it.
We got on friendly terms, and he told me many of his strange adventures on sea and land, and among the Coral Isles of the South Pacific Ocean.
Davie Drake and Barclay Stuart are bold English boys of a type I have often met with, and dearly love.
Teenie, the wee fisher lassie, was a great favourite of mine down at D——, on the south coast; and many a strange, fairy story I have had to tell her, to command.
I have never met a wiser, funnier, or more daring lassie than my pet Teenie; nor a more honest deserving couple than her parents. Muffie the cat was a pussy of mine own, and a great traveller. The first mate, Archie, was a messmate of mine in the old P——, and we sailed the Indian Ocean together, from the far-off Cape of Good Hope, the mountains of which in summer are draped with the crimson glory of splendid heaths and geraniums, to the Red Sea itself.