18 books like Sea Tales
Murdo's War
Murdo and Hector are involved with whiskey smuggling during World War II. Their recklessness soon puts them and their country in danger.
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The water-witch
James Fenimore Cooper’s 1830 novel set in colonial New York follows seafaring smugglers and merchants as they evade the corrupt British government.
Shares: American Sea stories, Seafaring life, Sea Stories, Historical Fiction
The sea lions
If any thing connected with the hardness of the human heart could surprise us, it surely would be the indifference with which men live on, engrossed by their worldly objects, amid the sublime natural phenomena that so eloquently and unceasingly speak to their imaginations, affections, and judgments. So completely is the existence of the individual concentrated in self, and so regardless does he…
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The Red Rover: A Tale
In "The Red Rover," a notorious pirate is chased by a disguised agent of the Royal Navy. Romance, adventure, political intrigue, revelations of mistaken identity--here is Cooper at his best: a painter of brilliant seascapes, a riveting narrator of suspense.
--- The Library of America
Shares: American Sea stories, Sea Stories, Historical Fiction, History
The Sea-Wolf
Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf became an instant bestseller on its release in 1904. Ambrose Bierce wrote "The great thing - and it is among the greatest of things - is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen...the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is black for a man to do in one lifetime." The Sea Wolf tells the story of intellectual Humphrey van Weyden's toughening and growth in the…
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Moby Dick
"Command the murderous chalices! Drink ye harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick!" So Captain Ahab binds his crew to fulfil his obsession -- the destruction of the great white whale. Under his lordly but maniacal command the Pequod's commercial mission is perverted to one of vengeance. To Ahab, the monster that destroyed his body is not a…
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Typee
At one time the most popular of Melville's works, Typee was known as a travelogue that idealized and romanticized a mysterious South Sea island for readers in the ruthless, industrial, "civilized" world of the nineteenth century.
But Melville's story of Tommo, the Yankee sailor who enters the flawed Pacific paradise of Nuku Hiva, is also a fast-moving adventure tale, an autobiographical account…
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Old Man and the Sea
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.
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Afloat and Ashore a Sea Tale
The writer has published so much truth which the world has insisted was fiction, and so much fiction which has been received as truth, that, in the present instance, he is resolved to say nothing on the subject. Each of his readers is at liberty to believe just as much, or as little, of the matter here laid before him, or her, as may suit his, or her notions, prejudices, knowledge of the world,…
Shares: Seafaring life, Historical Fiction
Captains Courageous
Captains Courageous tells of the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the North Atlantic. He must work as a ship's boy for a fishing season after being washed overboard from an ocean liner.
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Lord Jim
This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his…
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Friends Though Divided
My dear lads: Although so long a time has elapsed since the great civil war in England, men are still almost as much divided as they were then as to the merits of the quarrel, almost as warm partisans of the one side or the other. Most of you will probably have formed an opinion as to the rights of the case, either from your own reading, or from hearing the views of your elders.
Shares: United States, Historical Fiction, History
The mirror of the sea
The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904-6 (Summary by Wikipedia). Conrad early in his life earned his bread as a Master Mariner in sailing ships. In his Author's Note to this work, Conrad states,"Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist .Within these pages I make a full confession not of my sins but of my…
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Precaution
The entire focus of this novel rests on the determined though sometimes woefully mistaken efforts of three British families--the Moseleys, the Jarvises, and the Chattertons--to arrange suitable marriages for their respective sons and daughters. The bulk of the early-nineteenth-century action is therefore played out through dinners, social calls, visits to summer resorts, and development of…
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Satanstoe ; or, The littlepage manuscripts, a tale of the colony
Every chronicle of manners has a certain value. When customs are connected with principles, in their origin, development, or end, such records have a double importance; and it is because we think we see such a connection between the facts and incidents of the Littlepage Manuscripts, and certain important theories of our own time, that we give the former to the world.
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Pan Michael An historical novel
The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving…
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St. George and St. Michael
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day. Through the lozenge-panes of the wide oriel window the world appeared in the slowly gathering dusk not a little dismal. The drops that clung trickling to the dim glass added rain and gloom to the landscape beyond, whither the eye passed, as if vaguely seeking that help in the distance, which the dripping hollyhocks and sodden sunflowers…
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
From the book:UPON my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventure in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a…
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