What would you like to read?Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
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What would you like to read?Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
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Jack London
Translated by Tauno Kopra
A collection of sea stories written in the early 20th century. The tales center on the brutal, elemental life at sea—shipwrecks, Cape Horn gales, superstition, and grim moral tests—following sailors, captains, and ship’s boys in moments where courage and cruelty collide. Expect terse, hard-edged storytelling, stark irony, and vivid maritime detail rather than a single continuing protagonist. The opening of the collection presents four stark sea pieces. First comes a “true story” of the Francis Spaight, where a capsized crew drifts starving until they force a rigged lottery and murder a defiant cabin boy—only to be sighted and rescued moments later. Next, aboard the Mary Rogers at Cape Horn, the hulking Captain Dan Cullen, obsessed with “keeping a westing,” refuses to heave to for a man overboard and later contrives a passenger’s death, coolly covering both in the log. Then a young hand on the Sophie Sutherland battles fo’c’sle superstition: after taking a dead man’s bunk he “sees” a ghost on night watch that proves to be a mast-shadow cast by the veiled moon. The final piece begins with a weary captain approaching Dublin Bay, pilot aboard and rain coming in, sketching the commercial grind before the excerpt cuts off.
