Rollo on the Atlantic

Twelve-year-old Rollo Holiday is sent across the ocean to join his parents in Europe, and the crossing itself is the whole book. His uncle George gets him and little Jane, the cousin the Holidays had adopted, aboard the steamer Pacific at New York, then goes off after a trunk that has gone astray and returns just as the plank is lifted, so the two children sail with nobody in charge of them. The rest is embarkation and state rooms, sailors in the rigging, a storm, a lottery the men get up on the ship’s daily run, and a landing at Liverpool that Rollo ends up managing alone. Abbott wrote it as instruction as much as story, and it holds a careful record of how a paddle steamer passage worked in 1853.