Idylls of the Sea, and Other Marine Sketches

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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About This Book

A series of compact sketches and natural-history studies drawn from long experience at sea presents vivid accounts of voyages, shipboard incidents, and encounters with marine life. Narratives range from dramatic episodes such as illness, storms, and close encounters with whales and sharks to quieter observations of birds, turtles, and submarine phenomena. The writing pairs practical seamanship detail with descriptive lyricism, conveying both daily hardships and the uncanny beauty and danger of the ocean. Together the pieces mix anecdote, scientific note, and reflective meditation on the sea’s moods and forces.

PREFACE

In these little sketches of a few out of the innumerable multitude of ways in which the sea has spoken to me during my long acquaintance with it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproduce for shore-dwellers some of the things it has told me. If I were to stop and consider what other men, freeholders upon the upper slopes of the literary Olympus, have done in the same direction, I should not dare to put forth this little book.

Let my plea be that I have not seen with their eyes nor heard with their ears, but with mine own. This may have some weight with my judges—those who will buy the wares I have to sell.

FRANK T. BULLEN.

Feb. 1899.