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Angry Island

The Story of
Tristan da Cunha (1506‑1963)

by
Margaret Mackay

Margaret Mackprang Mackay was born in Oxford, Nebraska on Nov. 19, 1907, and died on Oct. 14, 1968. The book jacket has the following blurb on her:

Many of her novels, including her first, the semi-autobiographical Valiant Dust (1941), are online at Hathi Trust, as well as The Violent Friend, a biography of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson.

A recent review of Angry Island, interesting if somewhat hostile, can be read online.

[p7] Contents

 p11  List of Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition Used, Copyright

The edition I used was the one published in the United States by Rand McNally & Company, 1964, but bearing the copyright date © 1963. The book remains under copyright in the United Kingdom and in many other countries until the end of the 70th year following the author's death (thus, at least Dec. 31, 2038); but in order for it to benefit from copyright in the United States, for 1963 copyrights, the last for which this provision was in force, American law required that its copyright be renewed with the United States Copyright Office in the appropriate year, which would have been in 1990 or 1991 — but it was not: the book has therefore been in the public domain in the United States since Jan. 1, 1992.

Illustrations

In the printed edition the 14 illustrations, all black-and‑white photographs, are gathered in signatures as can be seen from the List of Illustrations above. I've moved them to accompany the relevant text even more closely. Their original placement is given in the table above, but the links are of course to the new location.

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.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; any red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each page will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was well proofread; there are few typographical errors. These few errors then, when I could fix them, I did, marking the correction each time with a bullet like this;º or when trivial, with 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. Very occasionally, also, I use this blue circle to make some brief comment.

Inconsistencies or errors in punctuation are remarkably few; they have been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different shade of white — barely noticeable on the page when it's a comma for example like this one, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">. Finally, 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 the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation purposes, the pagination is indicated by local links in the sourcecode and made apparent in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ). 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.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my cropped and colorized version of the last photograph listed above, showing a cottage at the Settlement, very close to a low volcanic outcrop of the mountain, still fuming from the 1961 eruption.

[The design of the book's dust jacket is based on a photograph of a rocky storm-lashed shore, but the landscape is not identified as being that of Tristan, and might indeed be anywhere; I've chosen to ignore it.]

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.