Description

Sturgis & Walton, 1917. Hardcover, 374 pp. 1917 Reprint. In acceptable condition / NO dust jacket Blue cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Covers have a bit of nicking and fraying to cloth at corner tips and top and bottom of spine and moderate overall scuffing and soiling with a bit of the color scuffed off along edges. Binding tight. Original book seller's stamp (Paul Elder & Co.) on rear paste-down Small tear to top edge and some light erased pencil residue on half title page. Otherwise pages are lightly aged but unmarked with occasional light spotting and soiling. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Nice frontis-piece photo of Capt A. W. Nelson. [From Author's Preface] In the following pages I have endeavored to give the reader a correct idea of sea life such as I myself experienced thirty-five years ago. The sort of life which I have tried to portray will in a few years be a thing of
the past; in fact, even now sailing vessels are scarce, and with the completion of the Panama Canal it is generally conceded that they will be doomed to the scrap-heap, and that with them will also disappear- such conditions as I have tried to describe . . . For many years, commencing with my boyhood days, I have been in the habit of keeping a diary wherein I made notes of things that happened on shipboard, this with the object in view of writing a book at some future time. . . I finally decided to confine myself to one cruise at a time, and selected my first voyage at sea as the main subject of my story, not on account of any particular occurrence, but that it was under the eye of the hero of my story, Yankee Swanson, first mate, that I was taught to be a sailor. Yankee Swanson was a man whom I have always looked upon as the very embodiment of what a good sailor and officer should be under trying and at times desperate conditions. Another reason why I selected my first voyage, was my desire to make the reader acquainted with my friend and shipmate Jack Le Fevre, at present a successful man of affairs in Sweden, whom I have in a small way been instrumental in giving a fair start in life. With these objects in view I went to work and the result is nothing more or less than the feeble effort of a sailor to put on paper what he has actually experienced on land and sea.