Captains Courageous

Captains Courageous is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The novel originally appeared as a serialisation in McClure’s, beginning with the November 1896 edition. In 1900, in his essay “What We Can Expect of the American Boy,” Teddy Roosevelt extolled the book and praised Kipling for describing “in the liveliest way just what a boy should be and do.” The book’s title comes from the ballad “Mary Ambree”, which starts, “When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt”. Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers, published in The Times of 23 November 1892. Protagonist Harvey Cheyne, Jr., is the son of a wealthy railroad magnate and his wife, in San Diego, California. Washed overboard from a transatlantic steamship and rescued by fishermen off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Harvey can neither persuade them to take him quickly to port, nor convince them of his wealth. Harvey accuses the captain, Disko Troop of taking his money (which we later learn was found on the deck he fell from.) Disko Troop, captain of the We’re Here, bloodies his nose but takes him in as a boy on the crew until they return to port. Harvey comes to accept his situation. Through a series of trials and adventures, Harvey, with the help of the captain’s son Dan Troop, becomes acclimated to the fishing lifestyle, and even skillful. Great stories of the cod fishery with references to New England whaling and 19th century steam and sailing are intertwined with the “We’re Here”s adventures during a season at sea. Eventually, the schooner returns to port and Harvey wires his parents, who immediately hasten to Boston, Massachusetts, and thence to the fishing town of Gloucester to recover him. There, Harvey’s mother rewards the seaman Manuel, who initially rescued her son; Harvey’s father hires Dan to work on his prestigious tea clipper fleet; and Harvey goes to Stanford to prepare for taking over his father’s shipping lines.