Henry Carter Hull

A tale of intrigue, deceit an villainy set on the rugged coast of Cornwall. It is also a story of a father's love for his daughter who is swept off her feet by an audacious and handsome ship's captain. The story is set against the days of smugglers, Revenue men, pirates and sailing ships. With a red-herring or two thrown in for good measure, this is one of W. Clark Russell's best short stories. (Amazon)

Excerpt: "I will pass by all the explanations concerning the reasons of my going to sea, as I do not desire to forfeit your kind patience by letting this story stand. Enough if I say that after I had been fairly well grounded in English, arithmetic and the like, which plain education I have never wearied of improving by reading everything good that came in my way, I was bound apprentice to a respectable man named Joshua Cox, of Whitby, and[2] served...

Excerpt: "In a period of English history which graybeards call the good old times - the fine old times; that is to say, when Parliament was horribly corrupt, and the Poor Laws as barbarous as the Inquisition; when it took fifteen hours to go from London to Dover and when at least one-half of the conveniences which we now very reasonably call the necessities of life had no existence Southbourne was a small straggling village, and, by reason of the...

Excerpt: "A half-hour passed, and during that time I had sufficiently recovered from the distressful croak of the parrot to wonder, as any sailor would, how the ship was navigated; for I could not doubt that the clock kept pretty close to the true time, since the easting and westing made by the ship was small, never, perhaps, exceeding ten degrees; and the circumstance of noon having struck set me wondering in what fashion the captain and mates navigated...

Excerpt: "On Monday, August 8th, 1838, the large bark Ocean Ranger, of which I was second mate, was in latitude 38° 40' N., and longitude 11° W. The hour was four o'clock in the afternoon. I had come on deck to relieve the chief officer, who had had charge of the ship since twelve. It was a very heavy day-a sullen sky of gray vapor seeming to overhang our mastheads within pistol-shot of the trucks. From time to time there had stolen from the far...

Excerpt: "It was a brilliant afternoon. The sunshine in the water seemed to hover there like some flashful veil of silver, paling the azure so that it showed through it in a most delicate dye of cerulean faintness. The light breeze was abeam; yet the ship made a gale of her own that stormed past my ears in a continuous shrill hooting, and the wake roared away astern like the huddle of foaming waters at the foot of a high cataract. On the confines...

Excerpt: "I had passed from the deck, where I slept, to the cabin in too great a hurry to notice the weather. Now, reaching the poop, I stood a moment or two to look around, being in my way as concerned about the direction of the wind as Vanderdecken himself. It still blew fresh, but the heavens lay open among the clouds that had thickened their bulk into great drooping shining bosoms, as though indeed the crystalline blue under which they sailed...

Synopsis currently unavailable.

The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) is a nautical novel by William Clark Russell first published in 3 volumes by Sampson Low. According to John Sutherland, it was "the most popular mid-Victorian melodrama of adventure and heroism at sea." It remained popular and widely read in illustrated editions well into the first half of the 20th century. It was Russell's best selling and most well known novel. Russell noted in a preface, the novel 'found its first...

The Frozen Pirate is the story of Paul Rodney, a sailor who narrowly escapes death by shipwreck and exposure in the Straits of Magellan. Surmounting that peril, he faces another: Embedded in the Antarctic ice is an ancient vessel, filled with what seem to be frozen, contorted corpses. But the ship is a pirate ship, and the corpses aren't dead. When one of them revives, Rodney must fend off (and cooperate with, if he hopes to survive) one of the most...