William McFee's accomplishments as a writer sprang from the same character traits that led him to make seagoing his career--an adventurous and romantic spirit, an insatiable curiosity about the world and his fellow man, and a need to tell stories about what he found. He speaks in what seemed to his many readers a new voice, unembellished and unladen with literary artifice. His subject is the human condition, but because of the settings for his stories and the occupations of his characters his tales are exotic as well as universal. McFee breaks no new literary ground, but his stories were popular with a wide range of readers during most of his writing life. His popularity can be attributed, in part at least, to the clarity with which he views the people and the world he describes and to the detached irony of the narrators he employs. McFee is...