Adventures Adrift

<p>The book you are now holding is a literary artifact essentially faithful to the original text of Don Browns' hand-written manuscript.</p><p>Keep in mind that Don's manuscript was composed then. Don's China during the 1930s/'1940s had been wracked by decades-long warfare. Subsequent revolution brought sweeping social and jolting political alignments that demanded restructuring to reflect their new socialist cultural reality.  </p><p>Such was the case in post-bellum China under the newly ascendent Communist government. Control of language became an important feature. In 1979 the People's Republic of China replaced the long-used and familiar 19th century Wade-Giles system of romanizing--i.e. transcribing transliterating and pronouncing standard Mandarin Chinese into English using the familiar Roman alphabet. </p><p>Proper nouns denoting once-familiar cities regions and geographic locations were arbitrarily reassigned the new Pin Yin notation; as a result they no longer correspond with today's maps and charts. </p><p>Peking became Bejing. Tinsing became Quing Dao. </p><p>We've included the original Wade-Giles spellings followed by the contemporary Pin Yin pronunciations.  </p><p>Additionally contemporary graphic and digital media communication styles differ. Once widely applied forms of diacritical punctuation--used as pronunciation keys in the transliteration of foreign languages in popular media are rarely used if at all.  </p><p>In an effort to facilitate following Don's wide-ranging sea-going career additional page-below footnotes have been used to provide context items and events specific to Don's narrative.</p><p> Follow Don's wartime geographic locations along China's contemporary coastlines depicted by today's 21st Century cartography on page 122.</p><p><br></p>