Captains Courageous

Summary

Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here. The skipper, Disko Troop, will not lose a season's catch, which is his crew's bread, to take a boy back to New York; he does not believe Harvey's stories of wealth and suspects he struck his head when he fell. When Harvey calls him a thief over his missing money, Disko knocks him down. Harvey, after a talk with Disko's son Dan, returns to say he is sorry, and Disko signs him on as a boy at ten and a half dollars a month. Through the summer on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Harvey learns to bait trawls, row a dory, clean and salt cod, take his turn at the wheel and keep watch. The crew teaches him in its own ways: the Irishman Long Jack, the former navy man Tom Platt, the grumbling farmer Uncle Salters, the cook with second sight, Manuel, and Penn, a gentle man who lost his memory when his wife and children were swept away in the Johnstown flood. The book is full of the fleet's dangers: fog, icebergs, liners cutting through the fishing grounds, a drunken schooner that founders in a gale, and the Jennie Cushman, run down in the fog, whose skipper is pulled aboard after losing his son. In that hour Penn's memory and calling as a minister briefly return. The We're Here fills its hold first and sails home to Gloucester. Harvey telegraphs his parents, and his father crosses the continent by special train in record time. Harvey Cheyne Senior finds his son changed, and in a long talk tells the boy how he built his fortune and urges him to go to college. Harvey bargains to take over his father's sailing ships, and Dan is offered a berth in the Cheyne line. The book closes years later as the cook's prophecy that Dan would serve Harvey as master and man is coming true.

Top Lessons

• Work makes a man

  Harvey's riches mean nothing on the Banks; he becomes worth something only by learning skilled, hard work. Kipling shows character being formed by discipline and responsibility rather than by comfort.

• Humility before an apology

  Harvey's first act of growth is to go back to Disko and say he is sorry. Kipling makes this small, hard humility the door to everything else Harvey learns.

• A community of the sea

  The crew is Portuguese, Irish, Yankee and a broken Pennsylvania preacher, bound together by common danger and common bread. The book honors working men who risk their lives for their families.

• Fathers and sons

  Disko and Dan, and later Cheyne and Harvey, show two fathers who love their sons by teaching and expecting much of them. Harvey's talk with his father completes the education begun on the schooner.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Penn's case is the book's most notable medical interest: a man who lost his wife and children in the Johnstown flood and with them his memory and identity, living placidly under Salters's care until a fresh disaster briefly restores him. Kipling dedicates the novel to the physician James Conland. Seasickness, a suspected head injury, Disko's view that a bloody nose clears the head, and the constant deaths of the fleet complete the picture.

• Chapter I

  Harvey, seasick from a cigar, falls overboard; Disko suspects his wild talk comes from striking his head and recalls a skipper who went mad after a blow to the head.

• Chapter III

  Salters tells Harvey that Penn was a Moravian preacher who lost his family in the Johnstown flood and his memory with them.

• Chapter VII

  The sight of the Jennie Cushman's dead briefly restores Penn's memory; afterward Disko explains how the shock lifted him out of forgetfulness and how he slid back.

• Chapter X

  Gloucester's memorial service reads the names of the fishermen lost that year.