A STRANDED SHIP: A STORY OF SEA AND SHORE.
ByL. CLARKE DAVIS.
"If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again." RALPH WALDO EMERSON.NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM & SON, 661 BROADWAY.
1869.Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by G. P. PUTNAM, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. THE NEW YORK PRINTING COMPANY, 81, 83, and 85 Centre Street, NEW YORK.
TO
THE CREW
OF THE
"DICK AND CHARLIE,"
WHOSE LOVE MAKES ALL WINDS FAIR,
I INSCRIBE
THIS STORY.
NOTE.
IN the third part of this story, Captain Brown, wrecking-master at Squan Beach, is made to deprecate the absence of proper appliances for the saving of human life upon that dangerous bit of coast. Even in fiction I cannot afford to be unjust to our Government, which has within a few years provided every necessary safeguard suggested by either the experience of the wreckers or the exigencies of the service.
But it has not been more than twelve years, I think, since a German emigrant ship, the Minerva, was stranded on that beach, involving a loss of nearly three hundred lives. All of them would probably have been saved if at that time the wreckers had been supplied with a mortar or other facilities for casting a line over the wreck.
From the incident of the Minerva I have taken the last scene of my story.
For the action of Abel Dunlethe at Lucknow, I am indebted to a precisely similar incident in the career in Mexico, of the late Confederate General Henry E. Reed, who fell severely wounded in planting the flag upon the heights of Chapultepec. For this act he was promoted to a captaincy, and voted a sword by the General Assembly of Kentucky.
L. C. D.
