Ran Away to Sea

"I was just sixteen when I ran away to sea." So begins Will's reckless, romping adventure, a boy's fantasy of ocean glory that collapses into something raw and real aboard the whaler Pandora. Thomas Mayne Reid, the Victorian adventure writer who gave the world The Desert Home and The Boy Hunters, turns his gaze seaward in this tale of a young sailor whose innocence is measured in leagues and loss. When the Pandora intercepts a slave ship on the Atlantic, Will's education in the ways of the world completes itself in waters still poisoned by an ancient cruelty. The novel survives not as an endorsement of its era's prejudices but as a bracing chronicle of how adventure and injustice traveled the same currents.