The Voyage of the NORMAN D.
which I started a little while before you went away—very bloody, exciting, villainous, profane stories, were they not? I had such a great many ideas for pirate stories (and more and more ideas kept showing their faces), I finally decided that my pirates would make a much greater showing if I blended all the short tales I had written, and a great many more that I had in my mind, into one moderately long story. No sooner said than I started to work.
I found, in the course of the very first few pages, that I was getting involved in considerable difficulties. There had to be ships, that was certain; but I found that I knew almost nothing about ships. So I laid the story aside a little while, turned to Webster, and buried my face in the dictionary. I looked up every nautical term that I could think of, whether I knew it or not. I looked up nautical words found in books I had read. I studied the list of nautical words and their meanings at the end of The Dauber. Then the sails bothered me. I needed to know something about sails, and about different kinds of rigs, and about the fastenings of the sails and the names of them all. So I turned to the word sail, and-lo and behold! exactly what I wanted. Accompanying the word sail were two pictures, one of the schooner or fore-and-aft rig, and the other of the beautiful square-rig, each sail numbered and named below. I fell to work with great zeal, and
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