Recently, I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen since before the great lockdown bonanza. She turned up with a Christmas present she’d wrapped and planned to hand over last year, but it was not to be, so I won a bonus gift for 2022. I opened the parcel and discovered a 100-year-old copy of Kipling’s Captains Courageous in mint condition. I haven’t read this wonderful book since I devoured it on passage to South America in my 1903 Colin Archer boat five decades back and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s time you had.
I can’t imagine how Kipling, a land-based journalist with no pretension even to being a yachtsman, managed to get into the hearts of Victorian seamen. Neither can I fathom by what black magic he mastered the technicalities of the profession, steam or
