Frank Brown, Sea Apprentice

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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About This Book

A determined youth defies his comfortable middle‑class upbringing to go to sea, joining merchant vessels and learning seamanship through hardship and adventure. His apprenticeship covers storms, shipboard fights, voyages among islands, encounters with foreign crews, and passages home that test his courage and character. Setbacks and a serious catastrophe teach practical lessons about responsibility, leadership, and the sea’s unyielding rules, while gradual advancement and new opportunities mark his growth from eager boy to seasoned seafarer. The narrative blends factual maritime detail with episodic incidents that illustrate learning, loss, and maturation at sea.

PREFACE

In order to make it plain to my readers that the following pages may be read without danger of acquiring false information about the sea, or the ways of its servants, I beg to say that every incident recorded is fact, either well authenticated by others, or personal experience of my own. About the merits of the story I can, of course, say nothing, but I assure my readers of the accuracy of the details and information herein contained. I have naturally used the incidents to make a story, and given fictitious names of ships, places, and people. And I am not without hope that the reading of this book may be quite profitable to parents of boys wishing to go to sea, as well as pleasurable to the boys themselves.

FRANK T. BULLEN.

R.M.S. Omrah,
At Sea in the Great Australian Bight,
Easter Sunday 1906.