Round the Galley Fire

“It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the mist was driving between the masts. I was in charge of the boat, but try my dead best I could not help her being badly stove befor...

I was once in a house much frequented by seamen, when there entered the room in which I was sitting an elderly man of a somewhat sour cast of countenance, dressed--not, believe...

“‘Why,’ said I, pulling out my watch, ‘here it is twenty minutes past six, and the land seems rather farther off than it was before I turned the boat’s head towards it.’

A spirit-like minstrelsy echoes down from the glimmering inclined heights like a far-off chorus of human voices; the wind is full of the mysterious sound. It does not appear to...

There are lifeboat coxswains who need but close their eyes to see fearfuller things. Just where those little creatures are brandishing their tiny bats and flourishing their shri...

Presently, what looked to be a composant--a small trembling point of light--hovered in the blackness on the starboard bow, and a moment after there crept out under it a dull gre...

Should owners allow captains to take their wives to sea with them? Opinions vary among master mariners on this head. Some think that a man has as much right to be taken care of...

Take now the fishing apprentice. He comes to this severe, coarse life, himself most often of the coarsest. He is fresh from a reformatory, from a union, or, worse still, from th...

I was amused and interested some time since by hearing the story of the resolute behaviour of Mr. John Whitear, master of the schooner _Jehu_, a vessel of about 150 tons. Giving...

I climbed the steep hill that runs from the Belvedere railway-station, pausing now and again for breath and to glance at the summer beauty of the distant green land through whic...

But as steamers multiply and the number of sailing ships decreases, going aloft will become the least and most infrequent of sea duties. Practical seamanship, in the old sense,...

This, I say, was an old experience; but it was a time to try the stomach whilst it lasted. Think of three or four days and three or four nights of it! In these days if you are s...

These are the gayer thoughts, for they come with the hurricane-chorus that breaks from the forecastle of yonder ship as her crew get the anchor, now that the first of the flood...

Not very far from the London Docks, and within a stone’s throw of that refined and odoriferous thoroughfare known as Leman Street, Whitechapel, there is situated a large, fine b...

“It would have made a hangel growl to hear the captain, all through fear, placing this bailiff afore the werry hurricane that was blowing, and thinking of him only whom he’d ha’...

Owners of yachts do not all take the same view of the delightful pastime. Between the yachtsman who never seems so happy as when he is out of soundings, and those sailors who cr...

“Well, sir, if I had my way, I’d totally abolish the boxing system from the end of September till the end of March. That alone would greatly reduce the death-rate among fisherme...

Shortly after noon the watch on deck had come out of the forecastle after eating their dinner, when a small brig was made out right ahead, apparently standing athwart the ship’s...

I know not how this simple little narrative may affect others, but the relation of it moved me deeply. That four English sailors should meet with death so unexpected, so full of...

“The vessel’s name, sir? She was the Austrian barque _Grad Karlovak_, commanded by so humane a man that I feel fit to cry when I think of him and his kindness to us poor miserab...

These stories and sketches originally appeared in _The Daily Telegraph_. No further preface to them is needed than this statement; for the title under which they are collected w...

This was headed “_Elba_, brig,” and was a request to be allowed to thank Captain Jacob Backer, of the Norwegian barque _Sarpen_, for rescuing the eight men who signed the letter...

These are the “dignity men.” They have a little room in which they may dine apart from the Lascars, Kanakas, John Chinamen, and the others; but, somehow, they don’t seem to valu...