Chapter II: Introduction

Mr. Bullen’s work in literature requires no introduction. If it ever did, it has received one so complete from Mr. Kipling, that not another word is needed. Mr. Kipling, in phrases as happy as they are generous, has exactly described the character of Mr. Bullen’s writings. After that, to commend him to the public is superfluous. However, in spite of this, Mr. Bullen has asked me to write a few words to put in the front of his book, and I obey. If my introduction does no good, it will at least do no harm, and I shall at any rate have the pleasure of being in very good company. His whales and sharks and other monsters of the deep are creatures with whom one is proud to be associated.

These Idylls--little pictures--strike me as some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea. I take it that only a man who has used the sea as a common sailor, and before the mast, really knows it in all its humours,--has heard all those multitudinous voices that echo along the vast waste spaces of the deep. The officer is either too busy with his responsibilities of command, or else is off duty and so not at close quarters with the winds and waves. As a rule the sailor,--the man who heaves the lead, stands at the wheel, sits in the crow’s nest for long hours together, and does the more wearisome and leisurely duties of the ship, is not a person of sufficient imagination and education to record the impressions that come to those who do battle with “a remote and unhearing Ocean.” In Mr. Bullen, perhaps for the first time, we have a man who has been a fo’c’s’le hand and yet has the power, first to realise in a literary shape, and then to set down, the wonders of the flood. It was a most happy combination that for once the man who saw the tropic dawn from the crow’s nest of a whaler should be able to communicate the full magic of the scene.

It is not conventionally that I have called Mr. Bullen’s work “vivid.” It is of writing such as his that we can say, and say truly:

I watch no longer--I myself am there.

He transports us to the very place he describes--does not merely hand us a stereoscopic glass in which to observe a well-defined photograph.

One other quality has always struck me in Mr. Bullen’s work. In spite of the fact that he knows so much science, and makes so keen and convincing a use of this knowledge, there is always an air of mystery and enchantment about his writing. De Quincey’s brother told De Quincey that all his arguments against the supernatural were perfectly sound here in England, but that they did not hold “to the suth’ard of the line.” In the Southern Seas were still to be found realms where pure reason was not supreme. But Mr. Bullen’s experiences and Idylls are “to the suth’ard of the line.” He deals as a rule with that region of romance, and hence it is, I suppose, that a sense of something strange and fateful, and so fascinating, haunts his pictures of the sea.

But I am doing the readers of this book a very ill turn in keeping them waiting at the door. Let them be assured that there is matter well worth their marking within, and that if they are capable of taking pleasure in the sea and its secrets, they cannot fail of entertainment here.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.

CONTENTS

IDYLLS OF THE SEA
PAGE
1. THE PASSING OF PETER 1

2. THE LOSS OF THE FIRST-BORN 9

3. A TRUE SHARK-STORY 14

4. THE SLAVER 18

5. THE CRUISE OF THE ‘DAISY’ 25

6. ‘RUNNING THE EASTING DOWN’ 32

7. IN THE CROW’S NEST 39

8. THE BIRTH OF AN ISLAND 47

9. A SUBMARINE EARTHQUAKE 54

10. THE SILENT WARFARE OF THE SUBMARINE WORLD 61

11. AN EFFECT OF REFRACTION 67

12. A WAKING NIGHTMARE 73

13. THE DERELICT 79

STUDIES IN MARINE NATURAL HISTORY

14. SOME OCEANIC BIRDS 91

15. THE KRAKEN 99

16. CONCERNING SHARKS 112

17. FLYING-FISH CATCHING AT BARBADOS 131

18. UNCONVENTIONAL FISHING 139

19. DEVIL-FISH 146

20. OF TURTLE 159

OTHER SKETCHES

21. ‘HOVELLING’ 175

22. THE LOSS OF THE ‘ST. GEORGE’ 187

23. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MERCHANT SERVICE 196

24. CANCER CAY 212

25. A NINETEENTH-CENTURY JONAH 219

26. THE TRAGICAL TALE OF THE BOOMERANG PIG 230

27. A DAY ON THE SOLANDER WHALING-GROUND 238

28. SEA-ELEPHANTS AT HOME 245

29. AN INTERVIEW 253

30. UP A WATERSPOUT 261

IDYLLS OF THE SEA