Note by the Publisher

The manuscript from which this book is set is the carbon copy of a letter which the author wrote, during the weeks just following her return from the voyage recorded, to a distant friend with whom (as appears in the context) she had long had some piratical understandings. She mailed it in eight-page typewritten installments as they were produced. The book is identical with the letter except in the following particulars: (1) Many purely personal passages are omitted. (2) Much repetition due to the haste of first composition has been weeded out. (3) The name of the actual schooner and the names of some of the crew have been disguised. (4) The division into sections is an afterthought. (5) The end-papers consist of a document in code with which the author amused herself during one interval in the composition of the letter.

The narrative represents chiefly two obvious traits of its author. The first is a circumstantial memory. (Her jottings made day by day throughout the voyage, four pages all told, served but to recall changes of weather and stages of progress.) The second is that same intense natural love of natural beauty which found its first public expression in The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s Life There (1927). In The House Without Windows this passion clothed itself in fantasy which incorporated here and there some details of actual experience. In this record of an actual experience, it clothes itself in a shimmering veil of fantasy, so transparent that the actuality of the basic experience is rather heightened than obscured.

The voyage was taken three months after the author’s thirteenth birthday. The book comes to publication a little before her fourteenth. It is, then, the spontaneous output of a very young writer who, as it happens, has never as yet had a day of formal schooling, and who learns her craft by that simplest of all processes, enjoying with abandon whatever comes into her life, reading with absorption whatever comes into her hands, and writing with demoniacal energy whatever comes into her head. To the publisher, it seems that this one exhibit justifies her obvious contentment with the schooling which, for part of an ecstatic month, was got out of the Norman D., her rigging and sails and crosstrees, the men of her cabin and her forecastle; and out of the various magic of the waters beneath her keel.