Morris Graeme Or The Cruise Of The Sea Slipper

Morris Graeme, or The Cruise of the Sea Slipper is a sea adventure novel by Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860), one of the most prolific American popular fiction writers of the antebellum period. The Sea Slipper of the title is the ship on which the central nautical adventures unfold.

Ingraham had a particular gift for sea stories and produced numerous nautical novels across his career. His knowledge of ships and seamanship was wide and his sea fiction reads with the authority that practical familiarity provides. The Morris Graeme adventure follows the title character through the various dramatic situations that a fast ship in the period before steam dominated commercial shipping could provide.

The book belongs to Ingraham’s adventure fiction phase before his shift to religious fiction in the 1850s. The story-paper market that supported writers like Ingraham produced enormous quantities of cheap fiction across the 1830s and 1840s, and Ingraham’s commercial success during the period made him one of the most widely read American writers of his generation.