Captain MacWhirr cannot fathom anything outside the facts of his own life. His first mate, Mr. Jukes, is the perfect contrast as an imaginative man prone to speaking in figurative language. Though they are opposites, MacWhirr and Jukes respect each other and run a tight ship, until the crew notices the barometer predicting a serve storm. Jukes and the crew suggest alternate paths to MacWhirr, but he is unconvinced. Since MacWhirr has not experienced...

But strange as the journey may be, it's nowhere near as strange as what they will find waiting at its end. One of the lesser known novels by Jules Verne, but certainly a novel that is worth reading, An Antarctic Mystery or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is a fictional travelogue that describes the narrator's adventures as he travels from Kerguelen Islands, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, towards the South Pole. The novel is the account of the...

He was a British merchant, manufacturer, insurer, and spy, but Daniel Defoe eventually found his true calling as a writer-and his masterful fiction has endeared him to readers all over the world. A prolific author who published over 500 novels, travel guides, pamphlets, and journals, he was best known for his 1719 adventure novel Robinson Crusoe. Soon after the enormous success of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote this compelling account of high-seas drama...

Captain Blood is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini. The protagonist is the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, a fictional Irish physician who had had a wide-ranging career as a soldier and sailor (including a commission as a captain under the Dutch admiral De Ruyter) before settling down to practice medicine in the town of Bridgwater in Somerset. The book opens with him attending to his geraniums while the town prepares to fight for the Duke of Monmouth....

Once a celebrated Naval officer, John Rowland has fallen from grace. After slipping into alcoholism, Roland is dismissed from the Navy and shamed. Having lost everything, Rowland now works as a deckhand on the Titan, operating deck machinery and keeping watch. However, Rowland is just as shocked and horrified as the civilian passengers when the mighty ocean liner collides with an iceberg, beginning the ship's slow sink to ruin. As the Titan sinks,...

One of the first books published after the tragic loss of the Titanic, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters is a detailed account of the events the night of April 14-15, 1912, and how the tragic loss of life could have been averted. The largest ocean liner of her time, Titanic was on her maiden voyage when she struck an iceberg and sank in the frigid North Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew with her. The Sinking of...

Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) is the third book in the series chronologically, but the tenth by order of publication, and serves as the basis for one of the episodes of the Hornblower series of television films. With the Peace of Amiens under strain and war with France under Napoleon Bonaparte imminent in May 1803, Hornblower is promoted from Lieutenant to Commander and appointed to command the sloop HMS Hotspur. While readying for sea, he hastily...

The Mortzestus is reputed to be haunted but the crew dismisses the rumors as preposterous - at first. Two weeks out of port the rigging suddenly goes slack, a ghostly form arises from the sea, and shadows thicken around the vessel. The frightened sailors, convinced that supernatural powers are afoot, plot mutiny and demand to be set ashore. But a dense mist descends around the ship, threatening to swallow the craft and its men without a trace. The...

Featuring 19 of the finest works from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new compilation begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 tale 'Young Goodman Brown' and ranges across an entire century, concluding with Ernest Hemingway's 1927 classic, 'The Killers'. Other selections include Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart', Melville's 'Bartleby', Harte's 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', 'To Build a Fire', by Jack London, 'The Real...