A Master of Craft

Captain Flower has a real gift for handling a schooner and an even greater one for getting himself engaged. By the time W. W. Jacobs opens this comic novel, the master of the coasting vessel Foam is promised to several women at once, and his answer to the tangle is bold: he fakes his own drowning and vanishes to let the whole business settle. What follows is a farce of a faked death, loyal shipmates covering his tracks, and a gentler courtship between the mate, Fraser, and a young woman named Poppy Tyrell. Published in 1900, it shows Jacobs working the dockside world he knew best, stretching his usual short-story economy into a sustained situation comedy. Anyone who likes low-key Victorian humor and salt-water settings will find it sly and easygoing.