Captain MacWhirr cannot fathom anything outside the facts of his own life. His first mate, Mr. Jukes, is the perfect contrast as an imaginative man prone to speaking in figurative language. Though they are opposites, MacWhirr and Jukes respect each other and run a tight ship, until the crew notices the barometer predicting a serve storm. Jukes and the crew suggest alternate paths to MacWhirr, but he is unconvinced. Since MacWhirr has not experienced...

A new captain must lead his crew to safety and face his own internal struggles as he works to overcome disrespect, insanity, and coming-of-age all while sailing on an unforgiving sea. There is an invisible line that divides life into a before and after-adolescence and adulthood. The unnamed narrator of The Shadow Line is painfully aware of this, but is unsure where the line lies in his life. He recalls a number of rash decisions he has made, some...

He was a British merchant, manufacturer, insurer, and spy, but Daniel Defoe eventually found his true calling as a writer-and his masterful fiction has endeared him to readers all over the world. A prolific author who published over 500 novels, travel guides, pamphlets, and journals, he was best known for his 1719 adventure novel Robinson Crusoe. Soon after the enormous success of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote this compelling account of high-seas drama...

An exciting tale of nautical adventure on the waters of colonial New York Harbor. Chiefly set on the waters and islands of New York Harbor in the early years of the 1700s, James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Water-Witch (1830) paints a vivid picture of life in the little colonial port. It was familiar territory for Cooper, who a century later had served as a junior officer on board an eighteen-gun sloop-of-war stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That...

Once a celebrated Naval officer, John Rowland has fallen from grace. After slipping into alcoholism, Roland is dismissed from the Navy and shamed. Having lost everything, Rowland now works as a deckhand on the Titan, operating deck machinery and keeping watch. However, Rowland is just as shocked and horrified as the civilian passengers when the mighty ocean liner collides with an iceberg, beginning the ship's slow sink to ruin. As the Titan sinks,...

"An Iceland Fisherman" by Pierre Loti is an immersive voyage into the heart of the 19th century seafaring life. In this elegantly crafted novel, you'll embark on an epic journey with the rugged and hardy Breton fishermen as they traverse the tumultuous Icelandic waters in pursuit of the elusive cod. Vividly portrayed through Loti's lyrical prose, the unyielding ocean transforms into a canvas of human resilience, trials, and tribulations, reflecting...

But strange as the journey may be, it's nowhere near as strange as what they will find waiting at its end. One of the lesser known novels by Jules Verne, but certainly a novel that is worth reading, An Antarctic Mystery or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is a fictional travelogue that describes the narrator's adventures as he travels from Kerguelen Islands, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, towards the South Pole. The novel is the account of the...

The Waif Of The "Cynthia", synopsis: The plot revolved around a dark-haired boy called Erik in a family of blond Norwegians. He was discovered by them in the sea as a baby tied to a ship's buoy. There is however something wrong with him: he has not all the characteristic physical traits of the Scandinavian peoples. He has all the appearance of a Celtic. Dr. Schwaryencrona takes him under his wing and ends up discovering that Erik was adopted by a...

"Dagon" is a 1917 short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. One of the first stories he wrote as an adult, it centres around the recollection of a tortured, morphine-addicted narrator who was captured by a German ship during World War I. After escaping his captors, he drifted for many miles before winding up stranded in a hellish place littered with rotting carcasses and home to an ancient horror. A chilling tale by a master story-teller, "Dagon"...