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This volume contains ten short stories of various genres, including the early J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, based on the Mary Celeste incident and widely mistaken at the time for a factual account.

There is a degree of bliss too intense for elation. This little-known novella from one of the masters of the form is so unusual for Joseph Conrad's work in several respects, although not in its exotic maritime setting or its even more exotic prose—it is unusual in that it is one of his very few works to feature a woman as a leading character, and to take the form of a romance. Still, it's a Conradian romance: a sweeping saga set in the Indian Ocean basin, against a turbulent background o...

It is two years since Thomas Paine Kydd was spirited away in the night to serve his country aboard the old line-of-battle ship Duke William. Now, together with his high-born friend Nicholas Renzi and other members of the ill-fated Artemis, Tom is a shipwrecked sailor back in the land of his birth. They find themselves waiting to be summoned as court martial witnesses, and in a political act to shield an officer's reputation, they are shipped out in haste to the Caribbean - where sugar is king an...

Against the window a pale hand, a gentle wave that was not a wave at all. A distant female face veiled by the sweep of a curtain. Then stillness. Bendix remained transfixed for a full minute. It was most certainly a woman'Early eighteenth-century London, and two doctors are criss-crossing the boundaries of morality in the heady pursuit of scientific progress. It is a challenge that leads Sir Edmund Calcraft, an eminent and notorious anatomist, and Joseph Bendix, his young ambitious student, into...

Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882) of Boston left his studies at Harvard in 1834 in the hope that a sea voyage would aid his failing eyesight. He shipped out of Boston as a common seaman on board the brig Pilgrim bound for the Pacific, and returned to Massachusetts two years later. Completing his education, Dana became a leader of the American bar, an expert on maritime law, and a life-long advocate of the rights of the merchant seamen he had come to know on the Pilgrim and other vessels. Two years...