Among Typhoons and Pirate Craft — An Irish School Prize from Bandon, 1894

British seafaring literature and East Asian waters

Published in London in 1892, this volume recounts dramatic experiences of coastal navigation and conflict in East Asian waters. Its chapter headings refer to Shanghai, Nagasaki, pirate lorchas, typhoons, night landings and maritime encounters. Contemporary publisher advertisements credit the illustrations to Stanley Wood.

The author named on the title page, Captain Lindsay Anderson, was the literary pseudonym of Alexander Christie (1841–1895), who also published A Cruise in an Opium Clipper (1891). The work belongs to the late-Victorian nautical-adventure tradition; the title-page authorship should not be treated as proof that every narrated incident is independently verified historical testimony.

Of particular bibliographical interest is this copy’s documented Irish ownership: awarded at Bandon Grammar School in 1894 and preserved with a Cork bookshop label. The inscriptions offer a specific record of how an illustrated London maritime title circulated in late-nineteenth-century Ireland.

Prize inscription and Irish provenance

School prize, Bandon, County Cork: An original Bandon Grammar School prize plate records the award for “General Merit” to J. M. Wood at the “Christmas Examination 1894”, signed “H. G. Johnston, B.A., Head Master”. Founded in 1642 under the patronage of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, Bandon Grammar School is one of Ireland’s oldest schools. Its official history records an endowment in Boyle’s will of December 1642. The school also confirms that H. G. Johnston was headmaster from 1892 to 1931 and that its academic book-prize tradition is documented from at least 1808. The 1894 bookplate therefore places this copy within an unusually long tradition of Irish education and prize-giving. (Bandon Grammar School, school history.)

Cork trade provenance: Original W. & T. Evans bookseller’s ticket, 11 St Patrick Street, Cork, on the rear pastedown. The firm advertised books from this address in the Cork Constitution in November 1887 and is recorded again in the December 1920 Burning of Cork, when firemen saved its premises. The surviving evidence therefore establishes the bookseller’s presence at this address across more than three decades; a precise closing date has not been verified. Neither the ticket nor these records establish who originally purchased the volume. (Cork Constitution, 2 November 1887, advertisement; Irish Examiner, retrospective on December 1920.)

Irish association is original and dated, not a claim that the author, publisher or subject matter was Irish. The prize recipient J. M. Wood has not been identified further from contemporary school registers. The school’s prominent former pupils, such as Lennox Robinson and Graham Norton, have no documented association with this particular copy.

Bibliography: Chapman & Hall, London, 1892. Stanley Wood named in the publisher’s catalogue as illustrator. Christie’s pseudonym is recorded by At the Circulating Library.