William Clark Russell
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Formats
Description
Unlike many other writers of nautical action-adventure, William Clark Russell often added a layer of psychological and existential terror to his tales of heroism and happenstance on the high seas, reflecting the rigors of long stretches of isolation in trying conditions. His novel The Last Entry is a thrilling blend of pulse-pounding plot twists and gradually increasing suspense.
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Formats
Description
Excerpt: "My dandy-rigged yacht, the Spitfire, of twenty-six tons, lay in Boulogne harbour, hidden in the deep shadow of the wall against which she floated. It was a breathless night, dark despite the wide spread of cloudless sky that was brilliant with stars. It was hard upon the hour of midnight, and low down where we lay we heard but dimly such sounds of life as was still abroad in the Boulogne streets. Ahead of us loomed the shadow of a double-funnelled...
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Formats
Description
William Clark Russell joined the Merchant Navy at the age of 13 and served an eight-year stint, permanently damaging his health in the process. He then traded in life at sea for life as a writer, penning dozens of nautical romances and action-adventure novels over the course of his literary career. In A Tale of Two Tunnels, Captain Jackman of the Lovelace leads his crew on a series of adventures on and off the water.
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Formats
Description
This engaging nautical novel from English author William Clark Russell recounts the unusual whirlwind romance that springs up between narrator Hugh and the lovely Danish heroine Helga, whom he first encounters when she has disguised herself as a boy in order to secure safe passage on a ship.
Author
Publisher
Chatto & Windus
Pub. Date
2023
Language
English
Description
William Clark Russell (24 February 1844 – 8 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels.
At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The hardships of life at sea damaged his health permanently, but provided him with material for a career as a writer. He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels,...
Author
Publisher
Chatto & Windus
Pub. Date
2023
Language
English
Description
William Clark Russell (24 February 1844 – 8 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels.
At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The hardships of life at sea damaged his health permanently, but provided him with material for a career as a writer. He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels,...
Author
Publisher
Chatto & Windus
Pub. Date
2023
Language
English
Description
William Clark Russell (24 February 1844 – 8 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels.
At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The hardships of life at sea damaged his health permanently, but provided him with material for a career as a writer. He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) is a nautical novel by William Clark Russell first published in 3 volumes by Sampson Low. According to John Sutherland, it was "the most popular mid-Victorian melodrama of adventure and heroism at sea." It remained popular and widely read in illustrated editions well into the first half of the 20th century. It was Russell's best selling and most well known novel. Russell noted in a preface, the novel 'found its first...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "I told my story, and the three fellows listened attentively. Their eyes glowed in the lamplight as they stared at me. The weak wind raised a pleasant buzzing noise at the cutwater, and the lugger stole in floating launches through the gloom over the long invisible heave of the Atlantic swell. 'Ah!' said the helmsman, when I had made an end, 'we heerd of that there Tintrenale lifeboat job when we was at Penzance. An' so you was her coxswain?'...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) is a nautical novel by William Clark Russell first published in 3 volumes by Sampson Low. According to John Sutherland, it was "the most popular mid-Victorian melodrama of adventure and heroism at sea." It remained popular and widely read in illustrated editions well into the first half of the 20th century. It was Russell's best selling and most well known novel. Russell noted in a preface, the novel 'found its first...
Author
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "On Monday, August 8th, 1838, the large bark Ocean Ranger, of which I was second mate, was in latitude 38° 40' N., and longitude 11° W. The hour was four o'clock in the afternoon. I had come on deck to relieve the chief officer, who had had charge of the ship since twelve. It was a very heavy day-a sullen sky of gray vapor seeming to overhang our mastheads within pistol-shot of the trucks. From time to time there had stolen from the far...
Author
Language
English
Description
Excerpt from THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE OF A CHIEF MATE BY W. CLARK RUSSELL: "In the newspapers of 1876 appeared the following extracts from the log of a merchantman: "VOLCANIC ISLAND IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC. -The ship Hercules, of Liverpool, lately arrived in the Mersey, reports as follows: March 23, in 2 deg. 12' north latitude, 33 deg. 27' west longitude, a shock of earthquake was felt, and shortly afterward a mass of land was hove up at a distance...
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Description
Set sail for classic high seas adventure with this eclectic volume of short stories from William Clark Russell. Ranging from straightforward nautical action in the traditional vein to tales with a terrifying twist of the supernatural, you won't be able to put it down.
Author
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from abeam; but as the sun sank into the west the wind fined into light, delicate curls of shadow upon the sea that, at the hour of sundown, when the great luminary hung poised like a vast target of flaming gold upon the ocean-line, turned into a surface of quicksilver through which there ran a light, wide, long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration, rhythmic as the sway of a...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "A half-hour passed, and during that time I had sufficiently recovered from the distressful croak of the parrot to wonder, as any sailor would, how the ship was navigated; for I could not doubt that the clock kept pretty close to the true time, since the easting and westing made by the ship was small, never, perhaps, exceeding ten degrees; and the circumstance of noon having struck set me wondering in what fashion the captain and mates navigated...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "I will pass by all the explanations concerning the reasons of my going to sea, as I do not desire to forfeit your kind patience by letting this story stand. Enough if I say that after I had been fairly well grounded in English, arithmetic and the like, which plain education I have never wearied of improving by reading everything good that came in my way, I was bound apprentice to a respectable man named Joshua Cox, of Whitby, and[2] served...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "On the afternoon of this same day of Tuesday, October 31, Helga having gone to her cabin, I stepped on deck to smoke a pipe-for my pipe was in my pocket when I ran to the lifeboat, and Captain Bunting had given me a square of tobacco to cut up. We had dined at one. During the course of the meal Helga and I had said but very little, willing that the Captain should have the labour of talking. Nor did he spare us. His tongue, as sailors say,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Includes 12 illustrations The name of Horatio Nelson still rings across the United Kingdom, and further afield, as a great and gallant naval hero worthy of remembrance through the ages, his statue still stands atop a lofty column in one of the busiest squares in the world. However Nelson was only one of many heroes that fought the French Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, without whom the outcome may have been very different. Never seeking the public...
Author
Language
English
Description
Excerpt: "In a period of English history which graybeards call the good old times - the fine old times; that is to say, when Parliament was horribly corrupt, and the Poor Laws as barbarous as the Inquisition; when it took fifteen hours to go from London to Dover and when at least one-half of the conveniences which we now very reasonably call the necessities of life had no existence Southbourne was a small straggling village, and, by reason of the...
