Brassbounder

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Brassbounder: A Tale of the Sea" by David W. Bone. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This early work by David W. Bone was originally published in 1910 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. David W. Bone was a merchant seaman for all his adult life and this story relies heavily on his own experience as a cadet training in the late 19th century.

Adventures of an apprentice aboard a 19th Century sailing barque. A "brassbounder" is a youthful apprentice whose parents pay a premium for his appointment to a vessel, where for three years he does the work of an ordinary seaman, eats no better and gets no more pay, on the theory that he is learning to be an officer. This "brassbounder" who tells this story sailed from Glasgow round the Horn and back, meeting the dangers of storm and fog.

Written largely between the shipping crisis of 1917 and the surrender of German undersea arms at Harwich on November 20, 1918, this book is an effort to record a seaman's impressions of the trial through which the Merchants' Service has come in the war. It is necessarily halting and incomplete. The extent of the subject is perhaps beyond the safe traverse of a mariner's dead reckoning. Policies of governmental control and of the economics of our management do not come within the scope of the book except as text to the diary of seafaring. Out at sea, it is not easy to keep the right proportions in forming an opinion of measures devised on a grand scale, and of the operation of which we see only a small part. Our slender thread of communication with longshore happenings is often broken, and understanding is warped by conjecture. In pride of his ancient trade, the seaman may perceive importance and vital instrumentality in the ships and their voyages that may not be so evident to the landsman. By this is the mariner constantly impressed: that, without the merchant's enterprise on the sea—the adventure of his finance, his ships, his gear, his men—the armed and enlisted resources of the State could not have prevailed in averting disaster and defeat.

Excerpt from The Brassbounder: A Tale of the Sea To-day the weather, that has been fine since we left New York, has thickened. The brisk north wind that kept the sea-line clear died away to fitful airs during the night. Fog has dosed in on us and we go slowly, blindly, - tapping our way by soundings of the depths, - over the undersea ridges and gullies that lead on to Cape Race. Since an hour before daybreak we have seen nothing, heard nothing, of sea-neighbours or of the world beyond the limits of our bulwarks. The horizon, - blurred indefinite circle of a ship's length, - shows little sign of expanding to the hard blue division of sea and sky that is at present chiefly our desire. North Atlantic weather! Nine months winter and three months fog! Monotonous in its persistence, the fog has yet a certain quality of variety. With the passing of a fine quiet night, came dense cloudy vapours that hung closely to the ship, shrouding the decks and upperworks in an impenetrable pall. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.