Most of us have passed through a period of life during which we have
ardently longed to be, if not actually a rover, a buccaneer, or a
pirate, at least and really a sailor! To run away to sea has been the
misdirected ambition of many a youngster, and some lads there are who
have realized their desire to their sorrow. The boy who has not
cherished in his heart and exhibited in his actions at sometime or
other during his youthful days, a love of ships and salt water, is fit
for—well, he is fit for the shore, and that is the worst thing a
sailor could say about him!
The virile nations, the strong peoples, are those whose countries
border on the sea. They who go down to the great deep in ships are
they who master the world. On the ocean as well as on the mountain top
dwells the spirit of freedom. When men have struggled with each other
in the shock of war, or the emulation of peace, when they have matched
skill against skill, strength to strength, courage with courage, the
higher quality of manhood in each instance has been required upon the
sea; for there the sharp contention has been not only between man and
man but between nature and man as well. A double portion of heroic
spirit is needed to meet the double demand. That is the reason we love
the sea. It is this Homeric spirit of the Ocean Masters that fills the
dreams of youth and stirs the memories of old age.
In these dreams and memories the veriest boy catches glimpses of the
perpetual Titanic struggle of, and on, the deep; dimly discerning in
his youthful way, a thousand generations of heroic achievement before,
and through which, he begins to be; and he realizes that the ocean
affords such a field for the exhibition of every high quality that
goes to make a man as may be found nowhere else. The deck of the ship
is the arena upon which he can play a mighty part, and he loves it. In
imagination the boy now discovers a new world, like Columbus and
America; in dreams he opens a vast empire to civilization, like Perry
in Japan; sometimes he fights the battles of the free, like Nelson at
Trafalgar; or he strikes for his own flag on the decks of some gallant
_Constitution_. If he be a sportsman, he may pursue the great fighting
sperm-whale, or angle for “Jack Sharkee;” if an adventurer, he may
seek to pierce the icy barrier of mystery ringed about that polar star
by which he guides his ship; if a trader, he may visit strange lands
and seek new markets for his product; if a missionary, he may carry
his gospel of good tidings to dark peoples, ignorant of the meaning of
that southern cross which flashes in splendor above them in the
midnight heavens, and tell to them the story of the Ruler of the deep.
Wherever men achieve and do, wherever nations grow and prosper, they
have a mastery of the sea.
In these pages are gathered stories of the heroes of peace, not less
kings of the sea than those who have startled the mighty depths with
the thunder of their war-ship guns. The freshness, the freedom of it,
the joy and delight, the calm and rest, the strenuous life, the labor
and sorrow, the peril and danger, the reward and success, all are
here. We turn back some hundred years to go a-cruising with Cleveland.
We hunt the cachelot with Bullen. Our own Cooper takes us breathless
with the romantic Pilot over the dangers of the Devil’s Grip. Under
the Antarctic Circle we watch the sea lions play. Here a mighty
monster of the hideous depths seems to spread its tentacles across the
printed page in a struggle which Victor Hugo immortalizes. Flame and
smoke are those deadliest of perils to ships toward which gentle Jean
Ingelow conducts us. The sudden mutiny, the long cruise in the small
boat, the lonely islet affording the shipwrecked a haven, appeal to us
in these pages. We drift through the teeming waters of the Gulf
Stream. Daniel DeFoe, and Melville and Marryat and Cupples and Russell
and Kingston, unroll before us the panorama of the ocean. There are
also men great in other fields of letters who have felt the witchery
of the sea and tell us what it says to them—Charles Dickens, Pierre
Loti, Stevenson, Charles Reade, and Kingsley.
We envy the boy or girl who reads these tales for the first time. Fain
would we again enjoy such a happy privilege. And our envy deepens when
we think of the wide range of literature to which this volume will
introduce them. Lucky young people who open such pages for a first
glance!