Spanish Bloodhounds and English Mastiffs From “Westward Ho!” By CHARLES KINGSLEY

The Club-Hauling of the Diomede
  From “Peter Simple.”  By captain Frederick marryat

The Cruise of the Torch
  From “Tom Cringle’s Log.”  By Michael Scott

The Merchantman and the Pirate
  From “Hard Cash.”  By Charles Reade

The Mutiny of the Bounty
  From “Chamber’s Miscellany.”  Anonymous

The Wreck of the Royal Caroline
  From “The Red Rover.”  By James Fennimore Cooper

The Capture of the Great White Whale
  From “Moby Dick.”  By Herman Melville

The Corvette Claymore
  From “Ninety-three.”  By Victor Hugo

The Merchants’ Cup
  From “Broken Stowage.”  By David W. Bone

A Storm and a Rescue
  From “The Wreck of the Grosvenor.”  By W. Clark Russell

The Sailor’s Wife
  From “An Iceland Fisherman.”  By Pierre LOTI

The Salving of the Yan-Shan
  From “In Blue Waters.”  By H. De Vere STACKPOOLE

The Derelict Neptune
  From “Spun Gold.”  By Morgan Robertson

The Terrible Solomons
  From “South Sea Tales.”  By jack London

El Dorado
  From “A Tarpaulin Muster.”  By John Masefield

ILLUSTRATION

Song sung by labor gang.

FOREWORD

The theme of the sea is heroic—­epic.  Since the first stirrings of the imagination of man the sea has enthralled him; and since the dawn of literature he has chronicled his wanderings upon its vast bosom.

It is one of the curiosities of literature, a fact that old Isaac Disraeli might have delighted to linger over, that there have been no collectors of sea-tales; that no man has ever, as in the present instance, dwelt upon the topic with the purpose of gathering some of the best work into a single volume.  And yet men have written of the sea since 2500 B.C. when an unknown author set down on papyrus his account of a struggle with a sea-serpent.  This account, now in the British Museum, is the first sea-story on record.  Our modern sea-stories begin properly with the chronicles of the early navigators—­in many of which there is an unconscious art that none of our modern masters of fiction has greatly surpassed.  For delightful reading the lover of sea stories is referred to Best’s account of Frobisher’s second voyage—­to Richard Chancellor’s chronicle of the same period—­to Hakluyt, an immortal classic—­and to Purchas’ “Pilgrimage.”