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Tales Of Pirates And Blue Water
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (1859-1930) was a Scottish author. He is most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was partially modelled after his former university professor, Joseph Bell. Other works include The Firm of Girdlestone (1890), The Captain of the Polestar (1890), The Doings of Raffles Haw (1892), Beyond the City (1892), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896), The Great Boer War (1900), The Green Flag (1900), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Lost World (1912).
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
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164 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Conan Doyle
13.4k books24.3k followersSir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.
Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 19, 2023
La pirateria esiste da sempre, da quando l'uomo ha iniziato a navigare, ma la pirateria a cui tutti noi pensiamo appena sentiamo parlarne, è quella del Seicento ed ancora di più del Settecento. Ci sono i corsati, i bucanieri, ma i pirati sono proprio la feccia più immonda che esista, sono uomini senza scrupoli e senza un'anima, a cui piacciono fare razzie soprattutto delle grandi navi mercantili, dove si trovano materiali pregiati, cibo, ma soprattutto rum, tanto rum e donne!
Non me lo sarei mai immaginato, ma Sir Conan Doyle è stato tra i primi a raccontare le "gesta" di questi predoni dei mari. Tra mito, leggenda e cronaca, l'autore ci fa conoscere l'efferato protagonista della maggior parte dei racconti qui raccolti: il pirata Sharkey.
Tra saccheggi, tradimenti, travestimenti e tanto rum, conosceremo un pezzo della storia della navigazione di qualche secolo fa.
Lettura a tratti piacevole, con qualche colpo di scena degno di nota, scrittura scorrevole e corredata da alcune illustrazioni dell'epoca. Purtroppo queste illustrazioni non sono riferite ai racconti qui presenti, ma disegnate per il periodo piratesco in generale. Alle volte mi son trovato con illustrazioni che non c'entravano nulla con la storia che si stava delineando e lasciandomi così con l'amaro in bocca.
Discreto!
Non me lo sarei mai immaginato, ma Sir Conan Doyle è stato tra i primi a raccontare le "gesta" di questi predoni dei mari. Tra mito, leggenda e cronaca, l'autore ci fa conoscere l'efferato protagonista della maggior parte dei racconti qui raccolti: il pirata Sharkey.
Tra saccheggi, tradimenti, travestimenti e tanto rum, conosceremo un pezzo della storia della navigazione di qualche secolo fa.
Lettura a tratti piacevole, con qualche colpo di scena degno di nota, scrittura scorrevole e corredata da alcune illustrazioni dell'epoca. Purtroppo queste illustrazioni non sono riferite ai racconti qui presenti, ma disegnate per il periodo piratesco in generale. Alle volte mi son trovato con illustrazioni che non c'entravano nulla con la storia che si stava delineando e lasciandomi così con l'amaro in bocca.
Discreto!
September 19, 2021
Es una pena que Donan Coyle sea más conocido por su saga de Sherlock Holmes, cuando tiene otros libros muchísimo mejores. Es el caso de esta recopilación de relatos cortos, cuyo hilo común es el océano.
Entretenidos, graciosos, dejan poso,... muy buenos.
Sin duda volveré a leerle.
Entretenidos, graciosos, dejan poso,... muy buenos.
Sin duda volveré a leerle.
June 26, 2023
No estuvo mal pero no me había dado cuenta de que era un libro de relatos, entonces al leer el segundo y aunque mantenían a un personaje el protagonista cambiaba. Después del 5 ya cambiaron todos y así siguió en los demás.
El tema con los libros de relatos es que tengo que volver a entrar a una historia diferente, que vuelvan con el contexto y para que después dure de 40 a 20 minutos (y un poco menos aveces.
Por lo demás, el punto en común fue el mar. La mitad de los relatos aprox era de un pirata y los demás eran las aventuras de un pasajero, marinero u otro.
El tema con los libros de relatos es que tengo que volver a entrar a una historia diferente, que vuelvan con el contexto y para que después dure de 40 a 20 minutos (y un poco menos aveces.
Por lo demás, el punto en común fue el mar. La mitad de los relatos aprox era de un pirata y los demás eran las aventuras de un pasajero, marinero u otro.
July 1, 2023
Pueees... son un puñado de relatos marítimos que sirven para pasar el rato sin ser gran cosa. Ni tan mal.
**Alerta Spoiler!!
Estamos ante un conjunto de relatos que tienen en común el mar. Hay piratas, marineros, barcos, cofres, fantasmas, asesinatos...
Curiosamente, los 4 primeros tienen en común, de una u otra manera, al Pirata Sharkey. El resto son historias diferentes. Me gustaron mucho el de Goring y el de la bomba. Los de la serpiente y el cofre estuvieron bien. El resto meh.
En fin, 3 estrellas sobre 5 porque aunque me costó más de lo normal leerlos, fueron entretenidos.
**Popsugar 2023 categoría 9. Un libro con un color en el título.
**Alerta Spoiler!!
Estamos ante un conjunto de relatos que tienen en común el mar. Hay piratas, marineros, barcos, cofres, fantasmas, asesinatos...
Curiosamente, los 4 primeros tienen en común, de una u otra manera, al Pirata Sharkey. El resto son historias diferentes. Me gustaron mucho el de Goring y el de la bomba. Los de la serpiente y el cofre estuvieron bien. El resto meh.
En fin, 3 estrellas sobre 5 porque aunque me costó más de lo normal leerlos, fueron entretenidos.
**Popsugar 2023 categoría 9. Un libro con un color en el título.
July 6, 2022
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories provide us with a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations of the well-to-do man in the late Victorian and Edwardian days. I have already reviewed Tales of the Ring and the Camp, which were concerned with sport and war.
For a man of Conan Doyle’s age, the aristocrats enjoyed surprisingly violent sports such as boxing and fox hunting, and this is what the first part of that book was about. The addition of war in the second part may seem odd, but this was an age before unsporting practices such as landmines, grenades, poison gas, napalm and the horrifying killing machines of the twentieth century made war seem too ghastly to count as a sport.
Besides war was a common occurrence in Conan Doyle’s day, as Britain had an Empire, and it was mostly a matter of a British army with superior weaponry gunning down the natives of a far-away country.
A series of complex treaties kept war out of much of Europe, since to attack one big country would bring in all its allies leading to a catastrophic war. As World War One indicated, this security against war was fine when it worked, and resulted in a massacre when it broke down, a warning for anyone who sees nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
However that is another book which I have already reviewed. The preoccupations of the current book are pirates and sea stories. Why would a man like Arthur Conan Doyle be interested in those to the point where he can fill two books of short stories about them?
The interest in sea stories is easier to explain. This was an age before air travel. Much of business, diplomacy, holiday travelling and running an empire depended on shipping. A far larger proportion of the population worked in the shipping industry, including writers such as Jack London and Joseph Conrad.
A far greater number of people travelled in ships too. This was particularly true of Britain. To visit any country outside of England, Scotland and Wales required a journey over water.
Piracy may take some explaining, but there has always been a certain romanticism around the criminal and the outlaw – the pirate, the gangster, the confidence trickster and the highwayman (Conan Doyle cheats in the last story by having a modern-day highwayman as a pirate of the land).
People feel a sneaking admiration for the individualistic outsider who is sticking it to the government and the system. Never mind the cruelty and viciousness of these crooks. They are seen here to be like smugglers, people defying the rules and living life on their own terms.
Conan Doyle is obviously fascinated with the notion of the ‘anything goes’ pirate who lives outside our moral codes. Most of his stories in Tales of Pirates concern Captain Sharkey. Despite the love of lawless pirates, most writers tend to have an awe for the pirate captains, and despise their uneducated followers.
Sharkey (because he’s like a shark, geddit?) is the subject of the first four stories. In the opening tale, ‘Captain Sharkey: How the Governor of Saint Kitts Comes Home’, a ship is travelling in pirate-infested waters and fearing Sharkey. However Sharkey has been captured, and they are asked to bring the governor home. The plot twist is fairly predictable, and of course Sharkey is soon loose again. His ruthless actions go unpunished, making this the most disquieting story.
‘The Dealings of Captain Sharkey and Stephen Craddock’ has Sharkey pitted against a former pirate who has reformed and wishes to deal with the rogue pirate. In the end, Sharkey outwits Craddock, but a final sacrifice by Craddock helps to thwart some of Sharkey’s plans.
On a more ghastly note is ‘The Blighting of Sharkey’. The pirates capture a ship, and Sharkey shows us the romantic side of piracy, with such actions as throwing an old woman into the sea, and making a heartless comment about it. However there is a dark secret hidden on the ship that almost results in Sharkey getting his comeuppance.
‘How Copley Banks Slew Captain Sharkey’ offers the final chapter on the evil pirate, as well as containing a spoiler in its title. It is an appalling act of justice, but no worse than anything Sharkey performed. Nonetheless the ethics of revenge seem questionable when one considers the lengths and depths that Banks is forced to go through to get to Sharkey.
Next up is “The Slapping Sal”, a less interesting story of a sea battle with a pirate vessel that results in serious losses on both sides, but with the defeat of the pirates.
Finally there is the highwayman story, “A Pirate of the Land”. This is a fine finish to the pirate tales. This highwayman is a modern figure who drives a car, and holds up other cars, albeit he plies his trade for one day only before retiring.
His behaviour is peculiar. He robs his first victim, but asks for his address. Two young actresses are the next victims, but the highwayman returns their jewellery when they get upset. This differs greatly from how he acts when confronted by an odious rich man. The highwayman roughs up his unpleasant chauffeur, and strikes the rich man, not only robbing him, but stripping him of his clothes. An explanation for the highwayman’s behaviour is later offered. Conan Doyle is entirely on the highwayman’s side throughout.
Onto Tales of Blue Water, which begins with a chest and ends in a box. Conan Doyle is sometimes seen as a safe writer, but he has a taste for the macabre that would echo Edgar Allen Poe if he dedicated as much time to creating a descriptive atmosphere. This can be seen in the pirate stories, in ways I can’t reveal without giving out too many spoilers, and it can be seen in the Blue Water stories, which are more varied in subject matter.
In ‘The Striped Chest’, the crew of one ship find the remains of another, and proceed to take on board anything of value, including the titular chest, which has a label warning people not to open it. Soon after the first officer is found dead near the mysterious chest. Is someone inside the chest, and what will happen when the captain has it opened in order to find out?
‘The Captain of “The Polestar”’ is a more melancholic story, a marine version of Wuthering Heights. The captain is a mysterious Byronic figure, who may be using a fake name, and who is not easy to get along with. He has taken the ship into icy waters, and the crew fear they will become locked in by the ice. On a more eerie note, a ghostly cry can be heard following the ship. Could it be the spirit of the Captain’s departed sweetheart?
Another mysterious force dogs people on land in “The Fiend of the Cooperage’. A captain who is also a lepidopterist stops on a quiet, almost inaccessible island that is hard to reach, which is maintained by a base of cheerful and welcoming British people. There is a cooperage on the island, but it has a bad reputation because several men who slept there have disappeared without trace. The captain agrees to stay overnight with two men and see what happens. Will the cooperage claim another victim, and what is the reason for their disappearance?
‘Jelland’s Voyage’ is a short tale of greed and foolishness. Jelland is the head clerk for an expert merchant in Japan. He corrupts another clerk called McEvoy, and they begin to gamble away the proceeds of their company. An attempt to escape from an examination of their books ends badly.
The remaining stories are intriguing for what they say about the psyche of the ruling classes in Conan Doyle’s day. The literature of any age offers a glimpse into the conscious and unconscious urges of the people who lived then, and I would argue that popular literature has more to say than artistic literature.
The artistic writer tells us something about the age, but the artist tends to be an outsider, a person who lives at a remove from current trends, and wishes to write self-reflexive works that are essentially about his/her art. The popular writer needs to tap into the zeitgeist of the time, and should ideally be appealing to (or sharing) the prejudices, attitudes, hopes and fears of many of his/her contemporaries.
In She, H Rider Haggard writes of a mysterious native leader hoping to take over Britain in an act of reverse colonialism. Such fears perhaps reflect hidden feelings of guilt, a recognition on an unconscious level that there is something tawdry about taking over another person’s land.
Similar notions may be at work in Conan Doyle's story, ‘J Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, which offers an explanation of the disappearance of the Marie Celeste. In this version of events we have a discredited survivor, and he is an abolitionist who fought the slave trade.
This proves to be his salvation. A dying black woman gives him an artefact as a thank you for his role in the abolition of slavery, and this will prove important. Several members of the Marie Celeste die, or are injured in mysterious circumstances. Finally the culprit is revealed to be the half-caste Septimius Goring. He takes control of the ship and brings on board more Africans seeking vengeance on the white man.
Jephson is spared on account of the artefact, which is connected to the black stone of Mecca. The Muslims are almost inclined to revere Jephson, but the jealous Goring wishes to lead them. It would be inadvisable to kill Jephson so he lets him go.
Conan Doyle had mixed feelings about black people. There is a Sherlock Holmes story about a woman who married a kind black man who died, which culminates with her new husband accepting her black son into his household. Sadly in other tales, Conan Doyle portrays black people in a negative light.
Here he gives a mixed picture. The hero is an abolitionist, and Conan Doyle thinks that this provides some karma to justify his survival. Nonetheless Conan Doyle does not have a high opinion of any of the black characters. Concerning the woman who provides the talisman, Jephson says lines like ‘Here she indulged into one of those half-heathenish rhapsodies in which negroes indulge”.
The black characters beyond her are even worse. The negroes recruited into the crew as agents of Goring are inferior to white crew members, we are told. Later they prove to be a savage and superstitious lot, who can easily be manipulated like children.
Nonetheless their actions are motivated by their anger over slavery, and we can see this as reflecting the white man’s guilt and fear of one day being held to account for his actions. It is a pity that Conan Doyle did not have the vision to make his black characters seem deserving of emancipation.
The final story is a cross between Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It reflects contemporary fears of terrorism that are still with us in new forms today, but it also shows how foolhardy many of them are.
This is ‘The Little Square Box’. A timid narrator relates an account of a ship journey that terrified him. He overhears two men discussing a box which they intend to set off with a trigger at a certain time, and he naturally fears a bomb.
Immediately the narrator links it to the fears of the time – Fenianism (an Irish terror group that anticipated the IRA) and socialism. As he says of the two leading ‘conspirators’, ‘The very name of “Flannigan smacked of Fenianism, while “Muller” suggested nothing but socialism and murder’.
While Conan Doyle was hardly a supporter of either cause, he is clearly laughing at the fears of the narrator, common ones at the time. Later the hero meets an old school chum who reminds him of another occasion when he blew something out of proportion. I will not say what Flannigan and Muller were up to, but we can guess that the explanation is going to be a comically harmless one.
The stories here are considerably better than those in The Ring and the Camp. Conan Doyle nicely builds up an atmosphere of suspense, and makes the stories exciting. They are more than just reflections of the attitudes of his day, though they are also fascinating glimpses into that.
For a man of Conan Doyle’s age, the aristocrats enjoyed surprisingly violent sports such as boxing and fox hunting, and this is what the first part of that book was about. The addition of war in the second part may seem odd, but this was an age before unsporting practices such as landmines, grenades, poison gas, napalm and the horrifying killing machines of the twentieth century made war seem too ghastly to count as a sport.
Besides war was a common occurrence in Conan Doyle’s day, as Britain had an Empire, and it was mostly a matter of a British army with superior weaponry gunning down the natives of a far-away country.
A series of complex treaties kept war out of much of Europe, since to attack one big country would bring in all its allies leading to a catastrophic war. As World War One indicated, this security against war was fine when it worked, and resulted in a massacre when it broke down, a warning for anyone who sees nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
However that is another book which I have already reviewed. The preoccupations of the current book are pirates and sea stories. Why would a man like Arthur Conan Doyle be interested in those to the point where he can fill two books of short stories about them?
The interest in sea stories is easier to explain. This was an age before air travel. Much of business, diplomacy, holiday travelling and running an empire depended on shipping. A far larger proportion of the population worked in the shipping industry, including writers such as Jack London and Joseph Conrad.
A far greater number of people travelled in ships too. This was particularly true of Britain. To visit any country outside of England, Scotland and Wales required a journey over water.
Piracy may take some explaining, but there has always been a certain romanticism around the criminal and the outlaw – the pirate, the gangster, the confidence trickster and the highwayman (Conan Doyle cheats in the last story by having a modern-day highwayman as a pirate of the land).
People feel a sneaking admiration for the individualistic outsider who is sticking it to the government and the system. Never mind the cruelty and viciousness of these crooks. They are seen here to be like smugglers, people defying the rules and living life on their own terms.
Conan Doyle is obviously fascinated with the notion of the ‘anything goes’ pirate who lives outside our moral codes. Most of his stories in Tales of Pirates concern Captain Sharkey. Despite the love of lawless pirates, most writers tend to have an awe for the pirate captains, and despise their uneducated followers.
Sharkey (because he’s like a shark, geddit?) is the subject of the first four stories. In the opening tale, ‘Captain Sharkey: How the Governor of Saint Kitts Comes Home’, a ship is travelling in pirate-infested waters and fearing Sharkey. However Sharkey has been captured, and they are asked to bring the governor home. The plot twist is fairly predictable, and of course Sharkey is soon loose again. His ruthless actions go unpunished, making this the most disquieting story.
‘The Dealings of Captain Sharkey and Stephen Craddock’ has Sharkey pitted against a former pirate who has reformed and wishes to deal with the rogue pirate. In the end, Sharkey outwits Craddock, but a final sacrifice by Craddock helps to thwart some of Sharkey’s plans.
On a more ghastly note is ‘The Blighting of Sharkey’. The pirates capture a ship, and Sharkey shows us the romantic side of piracy, with such actions as throwing an old woman into the sea, and making a heartless comment about it. However there is a dark secret hidden on the ship that almost results in Sharkey getting his comeuppance.
‘How Copley Banks Slew Captain Sharkey’ offers the final chapter on the evil pirate, as well as containing a spoiler in its title. It is an appalling act of justice, but no worse than anything Sharkey performed. Nonetheless the ethics of revenge seem questionable when one considers the lengths and depths that Banks is forced to go through to get to Sharkey.
Next up is “The Slapping Sal”, a less interesting story of a sea battle with a pirate vessel that results in serious losses on both sides, but with the defeat of the pirates.
Finally there is the highwayman story, “A Pirate of the Land”. This is a fine finish to the pirate tales. This highwayman is a modern figure who drives a car, and holds up other cars, albeit he plies his trade for one day only before retiring.
His behaviour is peculiar. He robs his first victim, but asks for his address. Two young actresses are the next victims, but the highwayman returns their jewellery when they get upset. This differs greatly from how he acts when confronted by an odious rich man. The highwayman roughs up his unpleasant chauffeur, and strikes the rich man, not only robbing him, but stripping him of his clothes. An explanation for the highwayman’s behaviour is later offered. Conan Doyle is entirely on the highwayman’s side throughout.
Onto Tales of Blue Water, which begins with a chest and ends in a box. Conan Doyle is sometimes seen as a safe writer, but he has a taste for the macabre that would echo Edgar Allen Poe if he dedicated as much time to creating a descriptive atmosphere. This can be seen in the pirate stories, in ways I can’t reveal without giving out too many spoilers, and it can be seen in the Blue Water stories, which are more varied in subject matter.
In ‘The Striped Chest’, the crew of one ship find the remains of another, and proceed to take on board anything of value, including the titular chest, which has a label warning people not to open it. Soon after the first officer is found dead near the mysterious chest. Is someone inside the chest, and what will happen when the captain has it opened in order to find out?
‘The Captain of “The Polestar”’ is a more melancholic story, a marine version of Wuthering Heights. The captain is a mysterious Byronic figure, who may be using a fake name, and who is not easy to get along with. He has taken the ship into icy waters, and the crew fear they will become locked in by the ice. On a more eerie note, a ghostly cry can be heard following the ship. Could it be the spirit of the Captain’s departed sweetheart?
Another mysterious force dogs people on land in “The Fiend of the Cooperage’. A captain who is also a lepidopterist stops on a quiet, almost inaccessible island that is hard to reach, which is maintained by a base of cheerful and welcoming British people. There is a cooperage on the island, but it has a bad reputation because several men who slept there have disappeared without trace. The captain agrees to stay overnight with two men and see what happens. Will the cooperage claim another victim, and what is the reason for their disappearance?
‘Jelland’s Voyage’ is a short tale of greed and foolishness. Jelland is the head clerk for an expert merchant in Japan. He corrupts another clerk called McEvoy, and they begin to gamble away the proceeds of their company. An attempt to escape from an examination of their books ends badly.
The remaining stories are intriguing for what they say about the psyche of the ruling classes in Conan Doyle’s day. The literature of any age offers a glimpse into the conscious and unconscious urges of the people who lived then, and I would argue that popular literature has more to say than artistic literature.
The artistic writer tells us something about the age, but the artist tends to be an outsider, a person who lives at a remove from current trends, and wishes to write self-reflexive works that are essentially about his/her art. The popular writer needs to tap into the zeitgeist of the time, and should ideally be appealing to (or sharing) the prejudices, attitudes, hopes and fears of many of his/her contemporaries.
In She, H Rider Haggard writes of a mysterious native leader hoping to take over Britain in an act of reverse colonialism. Such fears perhaps reflect hidden feelings of guilt, a recognition on an unconscious level that there is something tawdry about taking over another person’s land.
Similar notions may be at work in Conan Doyle's story, ‘J Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, which offers an explanation of the disappearance of the Marie Celeste. In this version of events we have a discredited survivor, and he is an abolitionist who fought the slave trade.
This proves to be his salvation. A dying black woman gives him an artefact as a thank you for his role in the abolition of slavery, and this will prove important. Several members of the Marie Celeste die, or are injured in mysterious circumstances. Finally the culprit is revealed to be the half-caste Septimius Goring. He takes control of the ship and brings on board more Africans seeking vengeance on the white man.
Jephson is spared on account of the artefact, which is connected to the black stone of Mecca. The Muslims are almost inclined to revere Jephson, but the jealous Goring wishes to lead them. It would be inadvisable to kill Jephson so he lets him go.
Conan Doyle had mixed feelings about black people. There is a Sherlock Holmes story about a woman who married a kind black man who died, which culminates with her new husband accepting her black son into his household. Sadly in other tales, Conan Doyle portrays black people in a negative light.
Here he gives a mixed picture. The hero is an abolitionist, and Conan Doyle thinks that this provides some karma to justify his survival. Nonetheless Conan Doyle does not have a high opinion of any of the black characters. Concerning the woman who provides the talisman, Jephson says lines like ‘Here she indulged into one of those half-heathenish rhapsodies in which negroes indulge”.
The black characters beyond her are even worse. The negroes recruited into the crew as agents of Goring are inferior to white crew members, we are told. Later they prove to be a savage and superstitious lot, who can easily be manipulated like children.
Nonetheless their actions are motivated by their anger over slavery, and we can see this as reflecting the white man’s guilt and fear of one day being held to account for his actions. It is a pity that Conan Doyle did not have the vision to make his black characters seem deserving of emancipation.
The final story is a cross between Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It reflects contemporary fears of terrorism that are still with us in new forms today, but it also shows how foolhardy many of them are.
This is ‘The Little Square Box’. A timid narrator relates an account of a ship journey that terrified him. He overhears two men discussing a box which they intend to set off with a trigger at a certain time, and he naturally fears a bomb.
Immediately the narrator links it to the fears of the time – Fenianism (an Irish terror group that anticipated the IRA) and socialism. As he says of the two leading ‘conspirators’, ‘The very name of “Flannigan smacked of Fenianism, while “Muller” suggested nothing but socialism and murder’.
While Conan Doyle was hardly a supporter of either cause, he is clearly laughing at the fears of the narrator, common ones at the time. Later the hero meets an old school chum who reminds him of another occasion when he blew something out of proportion. I will not say what Flannigan and Muller were up to, but we can guess that the explanation is going to be a comically harmless one.
The stories here are considerably better than those in The Ring and the Camp. Conan Doyle nicely builds up an atmosphere of suspense, and makes the stories exciting. They are more than just reflections of the attitudes of his day, though they are also fascinating glimpses into that.
March 26, 2011
Conan Doyle was a gifted writer in many genres- and these sea stories prove as much. Mixing adventure, horror, humour and romance, these vivid tales are as entertaining as one could wish, vivid and surprising.
September 4, 2021
Narradas al másas puro estilo de Conan Doyle, este libro contiene nueve historias llenas de superstición y misterio.
En general, este libro esta muy bien, aunque hay alguna de las historias bajan bastante la nota general.
📖♥
En general, este libro esta muy bien, aunque hay alguna de las historias bajan bastante la nota general.
📖♥
January 26, 2020
Muy entretenido, historias de piratas que te sorprenden por lo originales y lo bien escritas que están.
September 5, 2023
3.5 me encanta la forma de narrar de Conan Doyle.
August 10, 2023
Siempre es entretenido leer de piratas, pero a estos cuentos les faltó emoción. Tenían un carácter más histórico dentro de la historia y no tanta acción como a mi personalmente me gusta en los cuentos de piratería.
January 10, 2022
Es lo único de Conan Doyle que he leído fuera de Sherlock Holmes. Me lleve una grata sorpresa. El libro es muy entretenido, con breves historias que son simpáticas.
June 23, 2020
A collection of short stories with majority relating to sea. The stories are split into two sections, piracy and other sea stories. The piracy stories are mostly about pirate Captain Sharkey's mischief while the other part is a collection of Blue Water stories, one with a flavour of supernatural. Funnily enough I found the best short story of the piracy stories part to be the one about a Rolls-Royce driving highwayman, 'A Pirate of the Land'. From the Blue Water stories two of the longest ones, 'The Captain of the Polestar' and 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' stuck with me the most. Both of them are told via the log of the crew member or passenger. The stories manage to be gripping and atmospheric partly thanks to the point of view character. While the quality is somewhat of a mixed bag, Doyle's best short stories more than make up for that and all the stories here are enjoyable.
April 22, 2025
Opera di Doyle sul mondo piratesco, troppe volte romanticizzato; eppure, com'è possibile non farlo? I racconti scorrono velocissimi, lo stile asciutto di Doyle mi fa sempre impazzire. Menzione speciale per il malvagio Sharkey, il pirata più temibile, con le sue terribili malefatte ed i suoi occhi azzurri cerchiati di rosso: indimenticabile. Il racconto finale li conclude ideologicamente tutti (e strizza un occhio alla nostra innata voglia d'avventurarsi per mare).
November 18, 2019
Raccolta di episodi dedicata al capitano Sharkey, pirata coraggioso, furbo e crudele, che con la sua ciurma terrorizza le coste atlantiche.
E' il primo libro di Arthur Conan Doyle che leggo e mi piace molto il suo stile, semplice e diretto, senza troppi "svolazzi" letterari.
Molto belle anche le illustrazioni.
3 stelle e mezza.
E' il primo libro di Arthur Conan Doyle che leggo e mi piace molto il suo stile, semplice e diretto, senza troppi "svolazzi" letterari.
Molto belle anche le illustrazioni.
3 stelle e mezza.
July 10, 2023
Popsugar Reading Challenge #9: Un libro con un color en el título.
Los relatos no son malos, pero tampoco te atrapan.
Los antagonistas cumplen con su objetivo, pero los protagonistas son mas bien aburridos.
Los relatos no son malos, pero tampoco te atrapan.
Los antagonistas cumplen con su objetivo, pero los protagonistas son mas bien aburridos.
October 31, 2022
My rating is for the second part of the book, Tales of Blue Water. I have no doubt the first part on Pirates is just as good.
November 20, 2023
A brilliant collection of pirate or otherwise sea-based short stories.
March 8, 2016
Tales of Pirates and Blue Water is a 1922 collection of short stories, mostly with a sea connection. Originally published in the late 19th and early 20th century, the stories are split into two groups connected firstly with piracy and secondly other sea stories. The piracy stories include the connected Captain Sharkey stories, whilst the Blue Water stories include one supernatural story – what turn of the century collection would be complete without one! All very atmospheric, some quite predictable but all very enjoyable.
February 29, 2020
Questi racconti di mare scritti dal grande Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, il mitico creatore di Sherlock Holmes, sono davvero poca cosa di fronte alla produzione poliziesca dello stesso autore. Dove sono il brivido e il terrore? Qui tutto è annacquato, scialbo, fiacco! Per fortuna il libercolo contiene solo sei racconti neanche lunghissimi e così non l'ho abbandonato, ma non merita di essere letto...La cosa più bella è la copertina con la riproduzione di una bellissima tela del pittore russo Aivazovsky.
August 28, 2016
This one is kind of a mixed bag: a bunch of pirate stories that owe a lot to some actual historical pirates (Kidd, Teach, et al), a story of a modern-day (for Doyle) highwayman, some mysteries/thrillers and one arctic ghost story. Doyle even takes a stab at solving the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
July 1, 2023
Llibre d'entretingudes històries fictícies sobre pirates i aventures navals. La edició que tinc és tan maca que supera al contingut. (7/10)
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