The greatest stories of the sea

The greatest stories of the sea

  10. Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

  Wouk, an ex-naval man renewing the Bounty mutiny, replaces Bligh as the neurotic petty tyrant Queeg, driving Kane's crew into mutiny during a dangerous storm. Even though Greenwald, the Navy lawyer, stands up for Queeg at the end of the book, we still know what a happy, unbending badass Queeg is.

  9. Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

  Kipling lived in Vermont for a while because he knew the emperor very well from India. Here he penned one of the boys' favorite sea tales, filled with the salty atmosphere of the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled rich man who falls off an ocean liner, learns to be a self-reliant young man fishing aboard the Here We Are from Gloucester, Mass.

  8. Sea worm, Jack London

  The opposite of Captains Courageous, the psychosadist Wolf Larsen, who hunts for his hated brother, as Humphrey Van Weyden, a survivor of a ferry accident, learns, the Ghost rules over a ship of hell, if ever there was one.  

  7. "Death Ship" by B. Traven

    The nameless narrator is sent to Yorikke... and soon wishes he hadn't.  

  6. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

  Heyerdahl tried to prove that South American Indians could migrate to Polynesia. His and his crew's odyssey on a balsa raft ranks with Slocum's voyage (see above) as one of the greatest true sea epics of all time.

  5. Open Boat Stephen Crane

  "None of them knew the color of the sky." Does another sea story have an opening line like this? Crane, a war correspondent in Cuba, lived the story he tells so memorably here, a condensed little saga of survival at sea.

  4. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

  Jules Verne gave a new twist to the nautical story by placing it underwater, in the Nautilus submarine. And Captain Nemo was one of the many brooding antiheroes to come. Verne proved that the wonders of this world are enough for science fiction.

  3. Richard Dana two years before Mast

  Shipwrecked by New England shears for health reasons, Dana discovers the harsh reality of shipboard brutality. His classic work revealed the hellish underbelly of 18th century ship life.

  2. Single Sail Around the World by Joshua Slocum

  Canadian Slocum became one of the great American sailors by circumnavigating his ship Spray unaided. His book is still one of the greatest sea adventures ever written.

  1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

  The book reeks of whale oil when the Pequod leaves Nantucket to hunt down the object of Mad Ahab's revenge.