Description
Charles E. Lauriat Company [Published Date: No date listed, circa 1925]. Hardcover, 187 pp.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
17
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In acceptable condition/ NO dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Bumping and scuffing to edges and corners of covers with a bit of knicking and fraying to corner tips and top and bottom of spine. light overall scuffing and soiling to covers as well. Spine is cracked in a few places and frontispiece illustration is starting to pull away from the top but is still attached. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked with occasional light spotting and soiling. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. The true story of an English civil-engineer who was shanghaied to serve on a four-masted barque across San Francisco Bay via Mexico, Chile, Australia and Fiji. With a Frontispiece by J. Spurling, 4 drawings and 2 photographs, chart and Plan of Deck. [From Review in Geographical Journal, Feb. 1926] In this unaffected narrative of an enforced voyage across the Pacific in a four-masted barque, there are all the features of the conventional “romance” of the sea. Among the crew were two clergymen, three bar-tenders and four agricultural laborers, all of who, with the author, had been dope and “shanghaied.” The food was bad, and for the early part of the voyage the crew suffered much at the hands of the first mate, guilty of some astonishing acts of cruelty. Then, in the good old style, one of the temporary sailors fights the bully to a finish. To all this, without sacrificing any effect, Mr. Bailey succeeds in imparting an atmosphere of reality. During the voyage he made first hand acquaintance with sea life, and appears as a master of a variety of slang. One of the incidents he relates, “The strange death of Old Man Smith,” is strangely effective in another and a weird genre…