A wonderful coming of age story which takes place on a fishing schooner off the Grand Banks. Harvey matures from a spoiled, indolent rich boy to a hardworking young man. Great story! ( )

2586 "Captains Courageous" A Story of the Grand Banks, by Rudyard Kipling (read 28 Feb 1994) I thought I should read this famous book. I disliked the fact it is full of conversation and hardly a word is spelled right because he is trying to convey pronunciation. A silly, inane way. The story tells of a spoiled rich kid swept off an ocean liner who is picked up by a fisherman off the Grand Banks ,and the kid quickly becomes a great hand on the "We're Here" out of Gloucester. It seems so dated in plot, and while the introduction compares it to Treasure Island, I liked Treasure Island much more. I have never liked Kipling much, since he seems so dated. And I despise the misspelling of English words to make things hard to read. I'm sure if I had read this in high school I'd have felt the same way as to the misspellings although the Rover Boyish plot might have seemed more appealing to me then than it does now. ( )

Harvey Cheyne, the 15-year-old son of a railroad tycoon falls overboard from a schooner across the Atlantic. He's saved from drowning by the crew of the cod-fishing ship, the 'We're Here'. But Disko Troop, the captain, thinks he must be a bit loony from shock when he begins talking about his family's wealth. Instead of turning back to deliver the lost scion, Troop puts him to work alongside his own teenaged son Dan, teaching him to fish and earn his keep.

An interesting short coming-of-age story meets a journalistic fascination with life aboard a fishing boat off the coast of New England, but I can think of two things wrong with the title... Not bad at all, but certainly not the adventure story that the title and my previous Kipling reading would suggest. ( )

I found Captains Courageous to be a bit on the dull side, compared with the rest of the classic type stuff I was reading as a kid. A fairly mundane type story, really, if you can call lost at sea mundane.

Kid gets lost, ends up on a ship full of grumpy sailors, has to work hard so he gets fed, etc., etc. You'd have to like that sort of thing.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2186 ( )

A great coming of age book. Wonderful and exciting story of the sea and the men who make their living on it. ( )