Ship Ahoy!

Posted on June 1, 2015 by | Posted in about LibriVox, Blog, Books, For Volunteers, Monthly Picks, News | Comments: Comments Off on Ship Ahoy!

June 8th is celebrated as World Ocean’s Day and June 25th as the Day of the Seafarer. Let’s leave our safe harbours behind and enjoy the sea with 10 gems from our catalog.

10 years ago, Ellida Wangel promised a sailor to marry him, but he disappeared. Now he returns surprisingly and further upsets her already strained marriage. Will Ellida leave her husband and become The Lady From the Sea? Read our production of Henrik Ibsen’s play.

Seafaring is a men’s occupation, but captain Saint Leger takes his whole family on The Cruise of the Esmeralda to search the treasure an ancestor has buried in the Eastern Seas. In the book by Harry Collingwood, they together face storms, pirates, and mutiny.

William Bligh is no stranger to the last either: He was the captain of the Bounty on her Voyage to the South Sea when the probably most famous of all mutinies happened. Nevertheless, he still made it – in a lifeboat – from Tofoa to Timor after the incident.

Jack does not think of that when he joins the Royal Navy as Mr. Midshipman Easy. Coming from a privileged family, he has to deal with bad weather, bullies on his own ship, and murderers on others. One cannot help wonder whether this book by Frederick Marryat is autobiographical…

Certainly so is The Loss of the S.S. Titanic written by Lawrence Beesley. He was one of the only 710 survivors of the disaster that struck the ‘unsinkable’ ship on her maiden voyage from Southampton to America on April 15th 1912.

Drifting in The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, all that the shipwrecked crew want is to get home. On their way there, however, they will encounter strange creatures and lands in the horror story by William Hope Hodgson.

Or maybe that’s just sailor’s yarn? Just like the famous ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, only one of our 17 Sea Poems: An Idiosyncratic Selection by the reader, chosen from various sources and authors.

Almost equally poetic is Robert C. Leslie’s A Waterbiography. The author, who had fallen in love with the sea as a child, was one of the first private people to own a sailboat and go on single-handed-cruising tours.

Much less romantic is the work on The Trawler. The life of a Gloucester fisherman is a hard one, as Simon Kippen will find out when he takes the place of his dead friend. The Story by James Brendan Connolly realistically describes the hardships of men sailing the Atlantic Ocean.

Not wet enough yet? Well, then start with The Mystery of the Ocean Star, the opening story to a collection of 23 short ‘maritime sketches’. These are only a few of the many stories and books involving the ocean written by William Clark Russell.

Enjoy – and set sail!

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