Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from In Sugar-Cane Land
During the journey from Waterloo I remembered, not without some pride, how entirely my fellow-man has mastered the treacherous deep. Nowadays these great ocean excursions are attended with no more inconvenience and danger than the act of putting up at a hotel. Our marvellous skill reduces Neptune's terrors to child's play. That poor old baffled sea-god may bury his trident in the sand, doff his crown, and go and live obscurely with the porpoises, for he rules the waves no longer. After which conclusion I opened the newspaper, to find, by a curious coincidence, that the Daily Chronicle of that morning was devoted almost entirely to wrecks. I never saw collected within the pages of one journal such a mass of maritime disaster. There were collisions and fires and loss of life all over the navigable globe; and when I reached Southampton the harbour appeared to be literally full of ships that had lost masts and encountered difficulties. Then, at the hotel, where I put up until the morrow, a private bed-chamber allotted me was decorated with gruesome pictures of the wreck of the London and a burial in mid-ocean. To hang up such things in an apartment generally occupied by somebody who is just going to sail struck me as being bad taste and poor judgment. If I had a marine hostelry, I should cover the walls of it with pictures of purely successful navigation, with seas as flat as billiard-tables, with blue, cloudless skies, with gigantic steamers puffing comfortably about among lighthouses, and promenade piers, and so forth. Southampton, however, is full of these alarming warn ings, and, taking all the evidence together, there is little doubt I am mistaken about Neptune; but instead of depressing me, as might have been expected, this accumulation of horrors awoke emotions of an entirely nautical nature. I longed to feel myself on the great sea, to hear the wild waves roar, and the stormy winds blow. I questioned myself as to whether it would be better to take the voyage in a rollicking, sailorlike Spirit from the outset, or simply appear as the lands man on board ship; and I decided that I would be marine to the backbone from the moment I set foot on plank. Better still, I would begin at once. So that night at Southampton I ordered grog, exchanged experiences at a public bar with sundry other sea-dogs, and then turned in, having let it be known I proposed rising about six bells. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
