IDYLLS OF THE SEA
IDYLLS OF THE SEA
AND
Other Marine Sketches
BY
FRANK T. BULLEN, F.R.G.S.
FIRST MATE
AUTHOR OF THE ‘CRUISE OF THE CACHALOT’
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J. ST. LOE STRACHEY
London
GRANT RICHARDS
9 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1900
First printed February 1899
Reprinted April 1899; August 1899; December 1900
TO
MY DEAR WIFE
THIS LITTLE BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
Most of these sketches are, by the courtesy ofthe proprietors, reprinted from the Spectator;the others have appeared in various magazines—theCornhill, Good Words, Sunday Magazine,Chambers’s Journal, Country Life, NationalReview, and Pall Mall Gazette. To the proprietorsof all these journals my hearty thanksfor their kind permission to republish are herebyoffered.
FRANK T. BULLEN.
PREFACE
In these little sketches of a few out of theinnumerable multitude of ways in which the seahas spoken to me during my long acquaintancewith it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproducefor shore-dwellers some of the things ithas told me. If I were to stop and consider whatother men, freeholders upon the upper slopes ofthe literary Olympus, have done in the samedirection, I should not dare to put forth thislittle book.
Let my plea be that I have not seen with theireyes nor heard with their ears, but with mine own.This may have some weight with my judges—thosewho will buy the wares I have to sell.
FRANK T. BULLEN.
Feb. 1899.
xi
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Bullen’s work in literature requires nointroduction. If it ever did, it has received oneso complete from Mr. Kipling, that not anotherword is needed. Mr. Kipling, in phrases as happyas they are generous, has exactly described thecharacter of Mr. Bullen’s writings. After that,to commend him to the public is superfluous.However, in spite of this, Mr. Bullen has askedme to write a few words to put in the front ofhis book, and I obey. If my introduction doesno good, it will at least do no harm, and I shall atany rate have the pleasure of being in very goodcompany. His whales and sharks and othermonsters of the deep are creatures with whomone is proud to be associated.
These Idylls—little pictures—strike me as someof the most vivid things ever written about thesea. I take it that only a man who has used thesea as a common sailor, and before the mast, reallyxiiknows it in all its humours,—has heard all thosemultitudinous voices that echo along the vastwaste spaces of the deep. The officer is either toobusy with his respo