Spindrift
Salt from the Ocean of English Prose

Table of Contents

Preface: John Wycliffe: The story of Jonah
Geoffrey Chaucer: The astrolabe
Sir Thomas Malory: King Arthur's dream
The passing of Arthur
Cardinal Wolsey: A letter to the Bishop of Worcester
The Book of Common Prayer: God's mercy to mariners
A prayer
Sir Thomas More and Ralph Robinson: Hythloday home from Utopia
John Lyly: Boxing the compass
Richard Hakluyt: Preface to the Principal Navigations
The corposant
Martin Frobisher's second voyage
Valiant enterprise of the tall ship Primrose
A water famine
'Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona'
The taking of the Madre de Dios
Sir Walter Raleigh: The last fight of the Revenge
Francis Bacon: The influence of sea power
A paradox
Lord Herbert of Cherbury: The channel passage in 1609
William Shakespeare: The Tempest
Alongshore
Authorized Version of the Bible: Man's insignificance
The shipwreck of St Paul
Samuel Purchas: The services of the sea
Sir Thomas Overbury: Character of the sailor
Sir William Monson: The choice of captains
Captain John Smith: The pathway to experience
Thomas Fuller: The good sea captain
Samuel Pepys: The restoration of Charles II
John Evelyn: The galleys!
The death of Lord Sandwich
Samuel Pepys
Lord Clarendon: Scenes from the great civil war
William Wycherley: The man of action
William Congreve: An ill-sorted couple
Charles Shadwell: Brutal and finical
Joseph Addison: Of monuments and in particular of Sir Clowdisley Shovel's
The mirror of the infinite
Sir Richard Steele: Inkle and Yarico
Alexander Selkirk
Daniel Defoe: Crusoe carries his salvage ashore on a raft
Crusoe builds a boat
Crusoe visits a wreck
Fighting under the Jolly Roger
Jonathon Swift: Gulliver captures the Blefuscudian navy
A great gale described
Gulliver's boat at Brobdingnag
Tobias Smollett: Roderick Random is seized by the press-gang
The surgeon's mates of the Thunder, off duty and on
Brutality of Captain Oakum
The cockpit in time of battle
A yarn from Commodore Trunnion
Commodore Trunnion's wedding-day
The death of Commodore Trunnion
Henry Fielding: Leaves from the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon
James Macpherson: A song of Ossian
Laurence Sterne: Mal de mer
Oliver Goldsmith: Officers of 'The Fleet'
Edmund Burke: New England fishers
Horace Walpole: The crisis
Edward Gibbon: The navy of Byzantium
Greek or maritime fire
Over land
Robert Southey: The death of Nelson
Sir Walter Scott: Dirk Hatteraick, - smuggler
Cast up by the sea
The making of a pirate
Charles Lamb: The old Margate Hoy
Washington Irving: The discovery of America
Captain Marryat: A flogging round the fleet
Captain Capperbar
The hardships of impressment
Weathering the Cape
and a chat with the bo's'n
Passing for Lieutenant
Equality, and the rights of man
Michael Scott: A sea-piece. Blue and gold
A nocturne. Silver and black
Wounded
Commodore Sir Oliver Oakplank and Lieutenant David Sprawl
Thomas Carlyle: Naval occasions
The Vengeur at death grips
Sound and smoke at Santa Cruz
Edgar Allan Poe: A sail! A sail!
Leigh Hunt: Seamen on shore
Gangway!
Richard Henry Dana: 'Man overboard!'
A savage and merciless tyrant
The sailorman and his memory
George Borrow: In the bay of Biscay
Alexander William Kinglake: Constantinople
William H. Prescott: Pioneers in the Pacific
Lord Macaulay: State of the navy under Charles II
Charles Dickens: The Pegottys at home
Storm and shipwreck
John Ruskin: A pair of seascapes
Nathaniel Hawthorne: How Jason built the Argo and set sail for Colchis
Walter Savage Landor: An imaginary conversation
John Lothrop Motley: How they brought the sea to Leyden
Charles Kingsley: Last of the Madre Dolorosa
'Vengeance is mine' saith the Lord
Thomas de Quincey: The Spanish military nun
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The voyage to England
William Makepeace Thackeray: The fighting Téméraire
James Russell Lowell: Mr X, Chief Mate
James Anth

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