Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Naturally this collection came to resemble the original article in that the most important feature was bibliographical; it came to demonstrate that a history of the sea, at least, is a series of biographies. Naturally, too, the records of some of the more active of the old master mariners were duplicated, more or less, in the various accounts — their work had attracted the attention of more than one writer. Accordingly, as the collection was read and reread, the names of certain captains became more and more familiar to the reader and then a time came when the name of one old captain came to mind whenever any true story of the sea was read.