Captains Courageous. A Story of the Grand Banks.

KIPLING, Rudyard.

Item Number: 136378

London: Macmillan, 1897.

First edition of Kipling’s richly detailed tale of American deep-sea fishing, with frontispiece and 21 illustrations by I.W. Taber. Octavo, original blue cloth elegantly stamped in gilt. In near fine condition with light shelfwear. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional example.

Like his two Jungle Books, Kipling wrote this morality tale of life aboard a New England fishing boat while living near Brattleboro, Vermont, his wife’s hometown. The book thus contains “something of his feelings about America—both his affection and his irritation” (Carpenter & Prichard, 296). “This is the only book of Kipling’s which is set entirely in America. All the characters are American. Not only that, but the heart of the book—its moral in a single sentence—is one of Kipling’s main beliefs of this period expressed in terms essentially American, or perhaps more particularly New England. He put it later in verse: ‘And the Gods of the Copy-book Maxims said: ‘If you don’t work you will die!’ It is a saga of hard physical work in conflict with natural forces. It is a book which could hardly have been written by anyone who did not admire Huckleberry Finn; it is a book whose claim to survival rests mainly on detail, and it is all American detail” (Mason, 119).