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."
But from the earliest growth of the art of fiction the sea was frankly
accepted as a stirring theme, comparatively rarely handled because
voyages were fewer then, and the subject still largely unknown. To the
general reader it may seem a rather astounding fact that in "Robinson
Crusoe" we have the first classic of this period and in "Colonel Jack"
another classic of much the same type. These two stories by the
immortal Defoe may be accepted as the foundation of the sea-tale in
literary art.
A century, however, was to elapse before the sea-tale came into its
own. It was not until a generation after Defoe that Smollett, in
"Roderick Random," again stirred the theme into life. Fielding in his
"Voyage to Lisbon" had given some account of a personal experience, but
in the general category it must be set down as simply episodal.
Foster's "Voyages," a translation from the German published in England
at the beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a
compendium of monumental importance, continued the tradition of Hakluyt
and Purchas. By this time the sea-power of England had become
supreme,--Britannia ruled the waves, and a native sea-literature was
the result. The sea-songs of Thomas Dibdin and other writers were the
first fruits of this newly created literary nationalism.
Shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century the sea-writer
established himself with Michael Scott in "Tom Cringle's Log," a
forgotten, but ever-fresh classic. Then came Captain Marryat, who was
to the sea what Dickens and Thackeray were to land folk. America, too,
contributed to this literary movement. Even before Marryat, our own
Cooper had essayed the sea with a masterly hand, while in "Moby Dick,"
as in his other stories, Herman Melville glorified the theme.
Continental writers like Victor Hugo and the Hungarian, Maurus Jokal,
who had little personal knowledge of the subject, also set their hands
to tales of marine adventure.
Such work as this has established a succession which has been
continuous and progressive ever since. The literature of the sea of
the past half-century is voluminous, varied and universally known, and
whether in the form of personal adventure, or in purely fictional
shape, it has grown to be an art cultivated with great care by the best
contemporary writers.
The noble band of singers of the sea, from the days of the Elizabethans
to the sublime Swinburne, belongs to another volume. It is the sincere
hope of the compiler that the present collection offers undisputable
evidence that the prose tradition has been fully sustained and the
reader will find in these pages living testimony to the marvelous
interest of the theme--its virility and its beauty.