I don't suppose there was anything particularly interesting about my first acquaintance with Whitman, which at 14 years of age I made in my old family mansion situated at Smith's Corner, America. I had been taking "The Galaxy" from its start, only a few months previous to the date I mention. I can still see myself in the sitting room of the old house. Smith's Cor., America, I will remind you, is a portion of Biddeford, Me. An extra "d" has got into the old English name--which, by the way, only a year later I passed through after a shipwreck on the Devonshire coast. (That was in 1867.) No one ever told me anything about Walt.
These amateurish speculations on maritime books are of no value except for the fact that they elicited an interesting letter from an expert on these matters. William McFee wrote us as follows:--
"The first thing I laid my hands on this evening, while hunting for some forgotten nugget of wisdom in my note-books filled with Mediterranean brine, was that list of books for a projected sea library. Perpend....
Tom Cringle's Log Michael Scott Two Years Before the Mast Dana Midshipman Easy Marryat Captains Courageous Kipling The Flying Cloud Morley Roberts The Cruise of the Cachalot Frank T. Bullen Log of a Sea Waif Frank T. Bullen The Salving of a Derelict Maurice Drake The Grain Carriers Edward Noble Marooned Clark Russell Typhoon Conrad Toilers of the Sea Hugo An Iceland Fisherman Loti The Sea Surgeon D'Annunzio The Sea Hawk Sabatini
"A good many of these need no comment. Attention is drawn not to the individual items, but to the balance of the whole. That is the test of a list. But there is a good balance, a balance of power, and a balance of mere weight or prestige. It is the power we are after here. Regard for a moment the way 'Tom Cringle' balances Dana's laconic record of facts. No power on earth could hold 'Tom Cringle' to facts, with the result that his story is more truly a representation of sea life in the old navy than a ton of statistics. He has the seaman's mind, which Dana had not.
"Then again 'Captains Courageous' and 'The Flying Cloud' balance each other with temperamental exactitude. Each is a fine account of sea-doings with a touch of fiction to keep the sailor reading, neither of them in the very highest class. 'The Cruise of the Cachalot' is balanced by the 'Log of a Sea Waif,' each in Bullen's happier and less evangelical vein. I was obliged to exclude 'With Christ at Sea,' not because it is religious, but because it does not balance. It would give the whole list a most pronounced 'list,' if you will pardon the unpardonable.... I regret this because 'With Christ at Sea' has some things in it which transcend anything else Bullen ever wrote.