Truxtun of the Constellation
by
Eugene S. Ferguson

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition followed in this transcription was that of my own copy of the book, © The Johns Hopkins Press 1956. That copyright was not renewed in 1983 or 1984 as then required by law in order to be maintained. The work is thus in the public domain; details here on the copyright law involved.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread; a very few typographical errors are all trivial, and therefore marked by a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my montage of the front and back of the book's jacket, respectively: the Constellation and the contemporaneous portrait of Captain Truxtun reproduced at the top of this page; for this icon, I've recolorized the latter to something like what the original painting must be or must have been. (I haven't seen the actual painting. Identical copies of a single version of it are found all over the Web, but I'm fairly sure it's a very poor red-deteriorated reproduction since the uniform was not dark brown. I used the well-known American Revolutionary War color scheme, which is in fact described as that of Captain Truxtun's uniform, pp133‑134.)

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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