Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on April 16, 2008 at 08:54:19 from 81.144.214.226 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Mixed Moss posted by Peter Ceresole on April 14, 2008 at 07:46:45:
I also think that the title is a skit on the sort of rather ponderously light-hearted memoirs that forgotten generations of colonial civil servants and traders wrote and published.
"1st Edition 1930, 8th edition 1931" suggests that the book is not to be taken too seriously!
Incidentally I hold the view that Captain Flint is a journalist, possibly a war correspondent modelled on EF Knight, he of "Small Boat Sailing", "The Cruise of the Alerte" and "The Falcon on the Baltic", who did indeed finally get round to publishing his memoirs, late in life, but who got bored with the project, much as AR himself did, and covered the last thirty years of his life in half a page.
Knight was certainly one of Ransome's heroes, so this may not be a very original observation - if it is a Tarboard cliche, I must apologise.
Captain Flint's gold mining episodes are analogous to Knight's attempt to locate the buried treasure on Cocos Island - which, along with "Treasure Island" provided the impetus for the plot of "Peter Duck".
This hypothesis would account for "thirty years of knocking up and down" and for the rather exotic list of labels on the trunk.
Ransome was himself a foreign correspondent who had covered a war - he knew about the business.