Period nautical artwork was often used to illustrate Captains Courageous.
Here,Winslow Homer’s Bringing in the Nets, 1887.
Captains Courageous
by Rudyard Kipling
with an afterword by C.A. Bodelsen
Signet Classic, 1981
HOW DO YOU like Kipling?” “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”That exchange between a handsome suitor and a demure young lady, the caption for what was once, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the number-one-selling novelty postcard, highlights the popularity of the British author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) in his heyday. His readership was huge; the Just So Stories, a score of popular novels, and collections of poetry captured the fancy of readers of all ages around the world.
Kipling’s writings continue to entertain today, despite the battering the author has taken among the literati as a symbol of British imperialism (his writing often commends England’s rule of India). Among positive testimonials, in an essay for the Christian Science Monitor some years ago,August Heckscher, late ofMount Desert Island, claimed that the library of a country house “should contain, first of all, a set of Stevenson and of Kipling.”
In the 1890s Kipling settled for a time in Vermont, where he wrote Captains Courageous (1897). In this memorable novel, a fishing schooner out of Gloucester, on its way to the Grand Bank, inadvertently rescues a boy, Harvey Cheyne, who has been swept from the deck of an ocean liner. This son of a railroad tycoon is forced to swallow his rich kid ways and toe—and heave—the line aboard the We’re Here, captained by the no-nonsense Disko Troop (surely one of the great fictional names of all time—just waiting to be appropriated by a grunge band).
Troop’s son Dan takes Harvey under his wing, teaching him the ways of shipboard life. The contrast in their lifestyles is heightened in dialogue: when Harvey talks about driving in a car, Dan replies, “Haow? Lobster-car?”When Dan mentions a “kelleg,” a stone used in place of an anchor, Harvey imagines it is some kind of marine torture.
