Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling (1896)

"Prize, oh! Haul!" shouted Dan, but the shout ended in a shrill, double shriek of horror, for out of the sea came - the body of the dead Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught him under the right armpit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoulders above water.
~Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

My mother grew up at a time when most people had collections of novels, stories, and poems by Rudyard Kipling, and you probably couldn’t find anyone who couldn’t recite at least one of two verses of his famous poem If (I can recite most of it myself, and mainly because my mother required me to learn it.) I now have her collection and pull it out to read on occasion, but Captains Courageous is not in there. I realize that the backlash from colonization has made authors of the time unpopular, but Kipling’s writing is valuable both for its quality and because it lets us see what life was like at the time he lived, regardless of whether his life would be politically correct today.

On the other hand, I did not realize that he wrote any books about the sea. In the introduction to the book by John K. Hutchens, written in 1961, he says the writing has held up well, but I struggled with the terminology and the writing to reflect the dialect of the Gloucester fishermen. Kipling explained in his biography that the story came about due to the tales told to him by a friend who had spent his youth on fishing boats in the North Atlantic, and so he built a story to include those tales as well as the information he gathered while spending a fortnight in Gloucester. He toured the harbor, went on ships, ate meals with fishermen, and was present for a memorial service for those who lost their lives to the sea. This was his only book that takes place entirely in North America.

The story goes thusly: Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled, haughty son of a multimillionaire, falls overboard from the steamer he and his mother were taking for a tour of Europe. He is rescued by Manuel, a Portuguese man working for the schooner We’re Here out of Gloucester. It is May, the beginning of the cod fishing season, and the fleet will not return to harbor until their holds are full, which will be sometime in September. Harvey cannot convince the skipper, Disko Troop, to return to port now so that he can reunite with his family, and Troop does not believe that Harvey is the heir to a fortune. Despite his initial obstinance, Harvey realizes that he must join the crew until they return to Gloucester.

Harvey’s trip over the deck rail of his steamer and return to his family after four months at sea is simply a frame to tell the story of late 19th Century cod fishing and the life of people on the coast of Massachusetts. His conversion from spoiled brat to hardworking and able fisherman was all too miraculous, but worth it to hear the stories of ships, legends, and superstitions of the sea. The writing was too verbose when it was not needed, such as when Harvey’s parents were making the decision about how to get to the East Coast from California, and too terse when more story was desired. I think it would have been interesting to learn more of the background of all the men on the We’re Here, but that was a little uneven and we heard more about some than others.

I thought the end of the book was a little hard to believe as well, when Harvey hopes to turn a small fleet of tea clippers, hauling tea in the Pacific, into a fortune at the early age of 22. He lacks the life experience of his father or even the wisdom his father could have shared with him during his youth since he spent all his time pampered by his nervous mother.