Pigeon Post is the sixth in the twelve book series of novels about a group of adventurous British children who call themselves the Swallows and the Amazons (and later the D’s are added). The children–John, Susan, Titty, and Roger (the Swallows); Peggy and Nancy Blackett (the Amazons); and Dorothea and Dick (the D’s)—are living what has most recently been named a “free-range childhood.” Their parents are responsible and supervising from a distance, but the children are allowed to camp, cook outdoors, sail boats, pretend, explore, hike, and climb with only minimal adult interference. The negotiations the children go through with their parents and other adults to enable them to do these things are an important and interesting part of the story.

In this installment of the Swallows’ and Amazons’ adventures, the children have decided to form a prospecting and mining company to find gold on the nearby High Topps, a stretch of high moors called “fells” in the book. Because of drought conditions and the danger of fires, the children must go through some extensive exploration and negotiation before they are allowed to actually camp near the High Topps instead of in the Blacketts’ garden, but once they actually make camp on the edge of the fells and begin to explore old, abandoned workings or mines for gold, the story really becomes exciting. The “pigeon post” comes into play because the children use three homing pigeons to stay in touch with their parents at home and send daily status updates to keep the adults informed and happy.

The book contains a lot of mining, engineering, and chemistry information. These children are adventurous children, but they are also studious and quite industrious. In this article at a website called allthingsransome.net, The Chemistry of Pigeon Post, a fan of Ransome’s books writes about the chemistry that is explicated and illustrated in the book. Of course, even the article contains a warning, as should the book itself, probably.

“An important caution: chemistry experiments can be very hazardous and shouldn’t be performed except under well controlled and supervised conditions and preferably in a well equipped laboratory. Reading about Dick making up aqua regia and pouring it on to his unknown powder in Captain Flint’s study makes me quiver! Things were certainly different back then when it came to chemical safety!”

I don’t know what the exact balance between freedom to explore and protection should be for children, but if our children nowadays are over-protected then Ransome’s children may well have been not protected enough. They certainly do some rather dangerous things in the book and manage to survive anyway.

Pigeon Post was the book that won for its author the first Carnegie Medal. The British Library Association presented Ransome with the inaugural Carnegie Medal at its annual conference in June 1936. I thoroughly enjoyed Pigeon Post, and I think my next Ransome read will be Winter Holiday, the fourth book in the series, which is also the book that introduces Dick and Dorothea Callum. (Yes, I’ve managed to read the books out of order.) I’ve already read: Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Peter Duck, and Secret Water.