The Boy Tar, by Captain Mayne Reid.
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This is a really extraordinary book, especially when you consider that
the author was the first to write in the Wild West genre, and was also
no mean naturalist. It is true that he did write a few books with a sea
setting, much like those by other nautical authors. But this book,
although the setting for most of the book is inside the cargo hold of
a merchant vessel, doesn't really fit into any of Reid's usual genres.
The young hero is a very little lad, no more than four feet high. He
has friends among the other boys of the village, but none of them seem
to get up to his sort of escapades. One of these involves stowing away
in the hold of a vessel bound for Peru, six months' voyage away. He
stowed away, as he thought, just before she sailed, but what he didn't
realise was that there was a great deal of last-minute cargo yet to be
loaded. When the ship finally sailed he found that he was right at the
bottom of a huge amount of cargo. Luckily he found that there were some
boxes of biscuits nearby, and, luckily also, some water casks. He works
out that he might be able to survive the six months on these supplies.
What he didn't reckon on were the rats, who soon deprived him of the
biscuits. It then became imperative to get out.
The next forty chapters, no less, detail the painstaking way in which,
armed only with a good knife, which eventually breaks and has to be
repaired somehow, and in the dark, remember, he makes his way through
layer after layer of cargo; through brandy casks, pianos, boxes of
ladies' bonnets; and all this in a hold whose shape made it harder and
harder the more he mounted towards the cargo hatch. This a very
gripping tale, faultlessly written, and very hard to put down. Unlike
other tales of the sea nobody gets killed, though some of the rats have
to go, even being eaten as the boy's hunger mounts.
Of course it does have a happy ending, but not many of us could have
done what he did, and certainly not many little chaps only four feet in
height. Makes a superb audiobook.
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THE BOY TAR, BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.