FOREWORD

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"