Sea Stories Books

Our first prize. The first faint pallor of the coming dawn was insidiously extending along the horizon ahead as H.M. gun-brig Shark—the latest addition to the slave-squadron—slowly surged ahead over the almost oil-smooth sea, under the influence of a languid air breathing out from the south-east. She was heading in for the mouth of the Congo, which was about forty miles distant, according to the... more...

CHAPTER I The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert.  The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls.  As “every one” was out of town perhaps the... more...

A TALL SHIP I CRAB-POTS 1 In moments of crisis the disciplined human mind works as a thing detached, refusing to be hurried or flustered by outward circumstance. Time and its artificial divisions it does not acknowledge. It is concerned with preposterous details and with the ludicrous, and it is acutely solicitous of other people's welfare, whilst working at a speed mere electricity could never... more...

CHAPTER I. THE HUCKSTER Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani. This house of such a startlingly singular... more...

I Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection. One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness—and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise.... more...

CHAPTER I. “As ye sweep through the deepWhile the stormy winds do blow,While the battle rages loud and long,And the stormy winds do blow.”Campbell. UST two years this very day since poor Jack Mackenzie sailed away from England in the Ocean Pride.” Mr. Richards, of the tough old firm of Griffin, Keane, and Co., Solicitors, London, talked more to himself than to any one within hearing. As he spoke... more...

PART I The first man to climb the Almena's side-ladder from the tug was the shipping-master, and after him came the crew he had shipped. They clustered at the rail, looking around and aloft with muttered profane comments, one to the other, while the shipping-master approached a gray-eyed giant who stood with a shorter but broader man at the poop-deck steps. "Mr. Jackson—the mate here, I... more...

Outwards Bound. “How’s her head?” exclaimed Captain Dinks, the moment his genial, rosy, weather-beaten face appeared looming above the top-rail of the companion way that led up to the poop from the saloon below, the bright mellow light of the morning sun reflecting from his deep-tanned visage as if from a mirror, and making it as radiant almost as the orb of day. “West-sou’-west, sorr,”... more...

CHAPTER I From the first the voyage was going wrong.  Routed out of my hotel on a bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end precisely on time.  At nine o’clock the tug was to have taken me down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited.  On the seat, outside, the driver and Wada sat hunched in a... more...

CHAPTER I.Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean roll;. . . . . . Upon the watery plain.The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remainA shadow of man's ravage, save his own,When for a moment like a drop of rain,He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. September 27, 1607. Dead bodies everywhere. The ocean, lashed to fury by the gale of... more...