Old Captains. Novellas

In these stories, the reader will find everything that is supposed to be in classic tales about brave sea-farers. There’s a desperate, hungry mutiny aboard, and a rascal who sails out to seek adventure. There is a secret hunt for a vanished treasure, and a treacherous conspiracy by the crew against their captain. There’s also a passionate love of an assistant for the captain’s daughter—and, in general, sailcloth, bunks, and holds packed with gunpowder.

It’s true: here the sides of the ships are not wrapped in cannon smoke, and black flags with skulls and crossed bones don’t flap from the masts. And the captains here are not those who sing:

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest.

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Drink, and the devil will take you to the end.

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Besides, where would cannon fire and pirates come from in these stories, if the action isn’t in the eighteenth century, but in the second half of the nineteenth—and not in distant Caribbean seas, but on rivers and along the shores of good old England!

Captains, assistants, and rascals like those we’ll read about sailed on unpretentious barges and schooners, delivering modest cargoes from wholesale warehouses somewhere by the Thames to shops, workshops, and small factories in coastal towns of Wales or Cornwall. They’d never even seen gold from Spanish galleons, being entirely satisfied with the modest pay that was paid to them in cash straight out of the profits from freight. Their crews consisted of an assistant, two or three sailors, a cook, and a junior—or sometimes just the assistant, who served as everything else aboard as well. In any case, even these workers of small coastal trade had to experience many entertaining adventures, and that’s what the well-known English humor writer William Wymark Jacobs (1863–1943) tells in his stories.

As Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky wrote in the foreword to this collection—he also translated these stories into Russian under the pen name S. Berezhkov.

CONTENTS:

Foreword

Salt-stained Captain

In Pursuit of an Inheritance

In Peacock Feathers

Poor Souls