Abstract
A sea story is always an adventure story. It necessarily involves characters leaving home and facing challenges. Starting with Robinson Crusoe, however, the tendency in maritime novels is to play down the element of adventure; there is an emphasis on the differences between the values of the sailor and the values of those who remain at home, and then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, an emphasis on defending the established order against the forces of subversion. The inclination of an adventure story is military and mercenary: it involves an enemy and, usually, the acquisition of wealth.1 Novels, including maritime novels, focus far more on the subsequent use that is made of that wealth. Typically, a novel will move from action in a variety of locations to the purchase of property in a chosen location; this is capital investment in a place of one’s own. Underlying this is a more abstract structure in narrative, in which movement is set against fixity. A pure adventure story would keep moving on from incident to incident, without any resolution; in a true adventure, the fixity of marriage and the purchase of a house, if such developments take place, are likely strike the reader as little more than afterthoughts that have been tagged on to conclude the work.
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Notes
On the adventure novel, see Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), and
Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (London: Dent, 1974).
On Stevenson and the adventure story, see Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), and
Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
See also, Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
On boys’ adventure stories, see Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), and
also Joseph Bristow’s Introduction to The Oxford Book of Adventure Stories (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. xi–xxv.
W. H. G. Kingston, Peter the Whaler (London: George Newnes, 1902).
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 1988), p. 500.
R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Sutherland, op. cit., p. 147, describes The Coral Island as the ‘most popular boys’ book of the century’.
The tendency to assume too much from the not very weighty evidence of boys’ adventure stories is a feature of some of the essays in J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
On Rider Haggard, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 239–46.
G. A. Henty, Under Drake’s Flag (London: Blackie & Son, 1910).
On Charles Kingsley, see Margaret Farrand Thorp, Charles Kingsley, 1819–75 (New York: Octagon, 1969).
Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London: Dent, 1960).
The claim that the maritime tale has had its day, and that the straightforward sailor hero is a less and less significant figure as the nineteenth century progresses and as we move into the twentieth century, might seem to be contradicted by a work such as Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1903), the most popular ‘invasion fantasy’ novel. Carruthers finds it hard to endure the emptiness and boredom of his life in London as a civil servant, but comes to life on a sailing holiday in the Baltic where he discovers a German plot to invade England. The problem with the novel, however, is that Carruthers is a ‘fogey’, a throwback to an earlier age who does not really belong at all in the modern world. The difficulty Childers has in creating a convincing hero really illustrates the redundancy by this time of a certain notion of the gentleman-sailor hero. Bearing in mind that The Riddle of the Sands was published just a little over ten years before the outbreak of the First World War, there is a huge gulf between the reality of the conflict and the world as imagined in this simple adventure story
On changing attitudes in the late-Victorian period, see John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 128–44.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
On physical sensation in the sensation novel, see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 146–91.
See the essay on pirate fiction in Jan Rogoziñki, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pirates (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), pp. 122–4.
On Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of the stages of capitalism, see Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power During the ‘Pax Britannica’ (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 9–10.
Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks (London: Macmillan, 1963).
The town of Gloucester, New Hampshire, also features as the real-life home port of the fishing boat in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm (New York: Norton, 1997).
Jack London, The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1989).
On the influence of Darwin’s ideas on London, see the Introduction to the Penguin edition, ibid., p. 12, and Bert Bender, Sea Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from ‘Moby-Dick’ to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 100.
On homosexuality in Melville’s novels, see Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC: 1986), and
Caleb Crain, ‘Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels’, American Literature, 66 (1994), pp. 25–53.
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© 2001 John Peck
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Peck, J. (2001). Adventures at Sea. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_9
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