From: jfh@cs.brown.edu (John F. Hughes)
Subject: Re: Sea Stories 
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 13:25:32 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.052052.1874@morrow.stanford.edu> francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir) writes:
>William R. Smith writes:
>
>	John Nall writes:
>
>		BTW, this thread awoke in me a great longing to 
>		read some more good sea stories. Anyone got any 
>		suggestions?
>
> [ Francise suggests Riddle of the Sands, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, The 
>  Cruise of the Kate, and Ocean Passages of the World].

Well, I feel obliged to make a couple of comments. First, the title of the
Ransome book is "We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea", not "We Did Not ..." It's
so rare that Francis makes a mistake like this that I felt I had to mention
it. 

Second, "The Cruise of the Kate," is not for everyone. By the time you're done
reading it, you may find that you really dislike its author quite a lot. 
Middleton must have been regarded, even in his own time, as something of 
an eccentric jerk. But he was, nonetheless, quite remarkable. 


And I want to add a couple more suggestions:

"Shackelton's Boat Journey," by Worsley. Shackelton was an Antarctic explorer.
On one trip there, his ship got caught in the ice and crushed over the course
of a couple of months. The 20-some men aboard unloaded a great deal of stuff
onto the pack ice, including the three ship's boats---two 20 footers and a 24
footer, as I recall. The lived on the ice for several months until they got
near the northern edge, when they set sail (6 men to a boat) for Elephant
Island, about 75 miles away. They hung out there for a while, and then
Shackelton and 5 men took off in the 24 footer and sailed something like 700
miles in the Southern Ocean to reach South Georgia Island. To give you an idea
of the conditions, a day or two before they landed, they hit some rough
weather off S. Georgia. A hundred miles or so distant from them, a freighter
foundered in the storm, while they managed to claw their way through on the 24
footer. 

"The Wreck of the Mary Deare," by Hammond Innes. A crew of 4 in a 38 foot 
boat salvaged from the French coast is sailing back to England at night with 
light winds but a full gale forecast. Suddenly they are almost run down 
by a freighter. One of them shines an Aldis lamp onto the bridge of 
the freighter to try to get the helmsman's attention, and realizes that 
there's no one there--a large freighter, down in the bows, is travelling 
full speed up the English Channel with no one at the helm. Next morning, they
see her again, and notice that all the lifeboat falls are hanging down the
sides. One of them goes aboard to investigate, but cannot get off---the wind
has come up to much for his boat to pick him up again. He remains aboard, and
finds one man still there, and that's the start of one of the most remarkable
stories you'll ever read. The courtroom scene is amazing....

"The Trouble With Cruising," by J Desmond Slieghtholme (sp?), possibly out of
print. A collection of stories of misadventure in small-to-medium sized boats,
culled from a life of messing about in boats. His observations on human nature
and boat nature are quite entertaining. 

-John Hughes