Chapter 1 Summary

In 1895, the crew of a mackerel schooner finds a bottle with a note in it. The bottle is floating off the coast of Massachusetts. The note is from a crewmember of the Falcon, which apparently sunk the previous year. "Our cable is gone ... our rudder gone ... God have mercy on us ..."

The Falcon was lost the year before. If her cable was off and her rudder gone, that means she was careening wildly when the crewmember wrote this note. It is a sad record of the last moments of the twenty men on board that ship.

Chapter 1 Analysis

This chapter, in all italics, is as if the author were reporting a dream or a memory. The author asks himself such questions as, "How do men act in a sinking ship? Do they cry?" He then proceeds to answer the questions he raises throughout...