AUTHOR’S NOTE

The main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood’s Magazine.  I had just finished writing “The End of the Tether” and was casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of “Youth” when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to my recollection.  Years before I had heard it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence.  It was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind.  Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects.  They have never had the time to get acquainted with them.  Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship’s life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck.  Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing.  In that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like.  The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men’s idle talk for which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation.  Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all.  I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr.  Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation.  I don’t mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament.  MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months.  He is the product of twenty years of life.  My own life.  Conscious invention had little to do with him.  If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly authentic.  I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my actual experience.