The Ghost Pirates [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION 'I am not at sea because I object to bad treatment, poor food, poor wages and worse prospects. I am not at sea because very early I discovered that it is a comfortless, weariful, and thankless life - a life compact of hardness and sordidness such as shore people can scarcely conceive. I am not at sea because I dislike being a pawn with the sea for board and the shipowners for players.' This was the verdict of William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), a man who had spent eight years of his life at sea, in the days when sailing ships still plied their trade despite the growing competition of steam. The son of an Essex clergyman and one of twelve children, he had signed on as a cabin boy at the age of fourteen, and initially suffered brutal treatment at the hands of a sadistic Second Mate. Subsequently protected by his hobbies, judo and muscle building, he went on to obtain his Third Mate's Certificate - and the Royal Humane Society's award for heroism when he rescued a drowning shipmate in shark-infested waters. Yet it remained a 'dog's life', and in 1902 he settled in Blackburn, Lancashire, earning a living by teaching Physical Culture to the local police, photography and, increasingly, writing. The Ghost Pirates (1909) was his third novel, of which The Bookman said: *We know of nothing like the author's work in the whole of present day literature.' This wasn't the only praise Hodgson received. The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Morning Leader, and Vanity Fair all lauded the author's 'considerable imaginative power and striking originality', to quote Country Life. Yet Hodgson, supporting a wife after 1911, never made much money, lamenting in 1914 that: 'I've not made a single penny piece out of my last books.' That was the year he volunteered to fight in the First World ix