The Falcon on the Baltic

As Arthur Ransome makes clear in his introduction, this is not a tale of maritime derring-do, it is an account of a brave voyage made by a small craft with a two-man crew. Although there are no thrills and spills, the account is engaging and amusing – closer to the pastoral travelogues of Jerome K. Jerome than to the gripping writing of Ransome himself. This edition meets the exacting standards that the book lover expects from Rupert Hart-Davis; the maps in particular are a welcome asset and make the journey far easier to follow.

"I remember what enormous pleasure I had in that book as a young man. I remember what enormous pleasure W. G. Collingwood had in it as an old one. It is a real beauty of a book, from the sailing point of view, and from the merely human. It is without a single dull paragraph, and this cannot be said of the Alerte book and still less of the earlier book concerned with a much bigger Falcon.

The 'Falcon' on the Baltic is by far the best book qua book that Knight ever wrote."

Letter from AR to Rupert Hart-Davis, 5 Nov. 1949, reproduced in Signalling from Mars : the letters of Arthur Ransome (1997), pp. 329-330.