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‘It was thick weather outside, with a rising wind, and the elder men stretched their watches. The hours struck clear in the cabin; the nosing bows slapped and scuffled with the seas; the foc’sle stove-pipe hissed and sputtered as the spray caught it; and the boys slept on …’ |
This is from Captains Courageous. Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled teenage son of a wealthy American railway magnate, has fallen overboard from a liner in mid Atlantic. He is picked up by a dory from a fishing schooner on the Grand Banks, and is taken on as a fisherman. The experience changes his life. The book is rich with details of the hard life at sea of Gloucester fishermen, their talk, the risks they run, and the pride they have in their craft, which Kipling learned of from his friend Dr Conland, during his time in New England in the mid 1890s. |
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