Note by the Publisher
The manuscript from which this book is set is the carbon copy of a letter which the author wrote, during the weeks just following her return from the voyage recorded, to a distant friend with whom (as appears in the context) she had long had some piratical understandings . She mailed it in eight-page typewritten installments as they were produced. The book is identical with the letter except in the following particulars: (1) Many purely personal passages are omitted. (2) Much repetition due to the haste of first composition has been weeded out. (3) The name of the actual schooner and the names of some of the crew have been disguised. (4) The division into sections is an afterthought. (5) The end-papers consist of a document in code with which the author amused herself during one interval in the composition of the letter.
The narrative represents chiefly two obvious traits of its author. The first is a circumstantial
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