Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks - Rudyard Kipling - 文宇宙｜Bookniverse

Captains Courageous throws readers overboard with Harvey Cheyne, a spoilt millionaire's son who tumbles from a luxury liner into the cold Atlantic. He is hauled aboard a Gloucester fishing schooner by sailors who could not care less whose son he is. Harvey finds himself put to work: gutting fish, hauling nets and standing his watch, alongside a crew who judge a man by his inner strength and grit, not his wallet. Kipling's tale of the Grand Banks fishing fleet is full of storms, danger and rough good humour. It is a coming-of-age novel about what it really takes to earn respect, friendship and self-worth.****************************Rudyard Kipling was uniquely placed to write it. Born in Bombay in 1865, he spent his early childhood in India before being sent to school in England, an unsettling separation that shaped much of his later writing. He returned to India as a young journalist, and the stories and poems he wrote there made him famous while still in his twenties. In 1892, Kipling married and settled for several years in Vermont, in the United States. It was there that he became friends with a local doctor, James Conland, who had worked as a young man on the Gloucester fishing schooners. Conland's first-hand stories of life on the Grand Banks fascinated Kipling, and the two men even travelled to Gloucester together so Kipling could see the fishing fleet and talk to real sailors. Captains Courageous, published in 1897, is the result: the only one of Kipling's novels set in America, and the only one built almost entirely on someone else's memories rather than his own.