Two Sailor Lads

Two Sailor Lads by Gordon Stables

In a remote Scottish fishing village called Methlin, two foster children named Fred Arundel and Toddie live with an elderly fisherman-poet called Eean and his wife Eppie. Fred is the orphaned son of a drowned fisherman, while Toddie is a foundling infant rescued from wreckage washed ashore during a storm, still strapped to a spar loaded with iron axe-heads and gold coins. One evening, while returning from their seaside cave aquarium, the children hear cries from the sea and Fred rows out to rescue a boy named Frank Fielding, who has been stranded on coastal rocks by the rising tide. Frank is the son of wealthy local landowner Mr Fielding of Benshee House, and this rescue forges a deep and lasting friendship between him and Fred. Over the following years, Frank becomes a frequent visitor to the humble cottage. The two boys share adventures aboard a small yacht called the Water Baby, playing at pirates, befriending sailors, and roaming the countryside. During one voyage they are caught in a squall and shipwrecked on a small uninhabited island, where they subsist for several days until Eean locates them after following a tip from fishermen who mistook the children's signal fire for supernatural apparitions. Toddie falls dangerously ill during the ordeal but recovers after Frank administers medicine from his mother's supply. Frank's mother, a proud and class-conscious woman, resists treating Fred and Toddie as social equals but is slowly softened by Fred's evident character and musical talent. She proposes adopting Fred as a companion to Frank, but after Eean puts the decision to the boy himself, Fred declines, unwilling to leave his foster family. A significant discovery occurs when Bunko, the cheerful village simpleton, saws open the preserved spar from which Toddie was rescued years earlier, revealing Portuguese gold coins and a water-damaged letter written in Spanish. The fragmentary document reveals that Toddie was carried on the spar from a vessel called the Santa Maria, that her mother had died at sea, and that her only living relative was an uncle whose identity remains obscure. The legal position is clarified sufficiently for Eean to establish that Toddie is rightfully his ward. Catastrophe strikes the Fielding family when Mr Fielding dies suddenly in London on the same Christmas night that Benshee House burns to the ground, having already been financially ruined by a commercial collapse. Frank is left penniless and dependent on reluctant relatives. He arrives on foot at the fisherman's cottage, humbled but determined. After honest reflection on how his privileged but undisciplined education has left him ill-equipped for life, he resolves to go to sea as an ordinary sailor. Fred meanwhile has risen through the merchant service by hard work and genuine seamanship. He sails aboard the barque San Salvador under Captain Cawdor, a gruff but fatherly Scottish master mariner. Fred earns promotion to second mate after diving overboard in a gale to save a drowning crewman. He is haunted by recurring dreams of Frank, whom he has not heard from in years. The San Salvador is commissioned by a trading firm to sail into the remote southern ocean and rescue the crew of a missing whaling brig called the Resolute, whose part-owner is a man named Señor Sarpinto. After a gruelling passage through stormy Antarctic waters, the ship locates the Resolute trapped in ice near a desolate island. As the rescue boat approaches shore, Fred recognises the landscape as the setting of his recurring dreams, and among the half-starved survivors on the ice he finds Frank, now a seasoned if exhausted sailor. The reunion is intensely emotional. Frank reveals that he too has been dreaming of Fred's arrival, night after night, until rescue seemed certain. The Resolute is freed from the ice by blasting powder beneath her hull, refloated, and both vessels make for New Zealand together. Throughout the narrative, the moral framework supplied by Eean's hard-won wisdom gives the story its ethical backbone. His own life history, told to the children in the opening chapters, charts a trajectory from idle dreaming and vanity through humiliation and suffering to eventual contentment and faith. He repeatedly teaches Fred and Frank that application, duty, and honest labour are the foundations on which a worthwhile life must be built, and the subsequent careers of both young men bear out the lesson.

By Gordon Stables · First published 1881 · Genre: Adventure Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Maritime Fiction · 35 chapters · 104,545 words

First lines

There is no more beautiful bay than that of Methlin on all the wild west shores of Scotland; there is no quainter or more old-fashioned little town than the fishing village that clusters around its shores, its wee little whitewashed cottages half hidden in the green of waving elders and drooping silver birch trees. Behind the village is a wealth of woodland, stretching for miles away up the valley, between hills so high that at sunrise they cast their darkling shadows far across the sea.

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Two Sailor Lads is listed on Textopian as a novel by Gordon Stables, dated 1881 CE.

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Tags

juvenile fiction · adventure fiction · Victorian literature · nautical fiction · sea voyage · coming-of-age · friendship · brotherhood · British Empire · colonial adventure · exploration · survival

Contents

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