Ever since the sun rose I had been looking ahead. The ship glided gently in smooth water. After a sixty days’ passage I was anxious to make my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics. The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the “Pearl of the Ocean.” Well, let […]

THIS could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak–the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men know- ing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning. We were sitting round a mahogany table that reflected the […]

I The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of […]

This tale, episode, experience — call it how you will — was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age — unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of […]

The white man, leaning with both arms over the roof of the little house in the stern of the boat, said to the steersman— “We will pass the night in Arsat’s clearing. It is late. ” The Malay only grunted, and went on looking fixedly at the river. The white man rested his chin on […]

I On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was […]

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.