Sea Urchins

Jacobs followed his breakout collection Many Cargoes with this 1898 book of comic sea tales, most of which first ran in Jerome K. Jerome’s magazine The Idler. The stories move between crowded ships and the English coastal towns their crews come ashore in, turning on the small schemes, boasts, and rivalries of sailors and skippers whose plans rarely survive contact with reality. The opening tale follows a fourteen-year-old on his first voyage, set on being taken for a pirate by a crew of unimpressed old hands, and the title plays on the double sense of sea urchins as both creatures and young rascals. Jacobs works in a dry, understated register, letting foolish plans collapse under their own weight. Readers who know him only through the macabre “The Monkey’s Paw” will find his lighter, more typical side here.