Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
The illustration between pages [116 and 121] was printed as a two-page spread.
Several illustrations are not included in the List of Illustrations.
[Page 48]: The date given for when the Essex was built (1779) is incorrect.
The Transcriber copied the index from Volume IV. It was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references. Most of the references are to pages in the other three volumes of this series; all four volumes are available at no charge at Project Gutenberg:
Volume I: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71794]
Volume II: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71795]
Volume III: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71796]
Volume IV: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71797]
In the original book, the index entries for "Biddle, Captain Nicholas" referring to Volume II. actually refer to his nephew, "Biddle, James", and some of those are in Volume III. In this ebook, those entries have been corrected, but the index may contain other errors.