Rudyard Kipling

Captains Courageous Illustrated Rudyard Kipling

Captains Courageous is an 1897 novel, by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The novel originally appeared as a serialisation in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition. The following year it was published in its entirety as a novel, first in the United States by Doubleday, and a month later in the United Kingdom by Macmillan.[1] It is Kipling's only novel set entirely in America. In 1900, Teddy Roosevelt extolled the book in his essay "What We Can Expect of the American Boy," praising Kipling for describing "in the liveliest way just what a boy should be and do. Protagonist Harvey Cheyne, Jr., is the son of a wealthy railroad magnate and his wife, in San Diego, California. Washed overboard from a transatlantic steamship and rescued by the crew of the fishing schooner We're Here off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Harvey can neither persuade them to take him quickly to port, nor convince them of his wealth. Harvey accuses the captain, Disko Troop, of taking his money (which is later revealed to be on the deck from which Harvey fell).