pirates

The Gentle Buccaneers – a gang of four pirates. They were a good company, physically, if not intellectually, although Endellion himself, the leader of the expedition and the owner of the yacht, was a classic scholar and passionate admirer of Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy he loved to translate. They liked to pose as people who were disfigured in a battle for peace. However, it soon became harder...

In The Pilot (1824), James Fenimore Cooper invented a new literary genre: the sea novel. Bold, vigorous, original, it is a tale of high adventure that vividly captures the majesty and power of the seafaring life. Cooper drew on his direct knowledge of ships and sailors to present a truer picture of life on the sea than had ever before achieved in literature. As a boy of seventeen he had experienced...

The young educated gentleman Guy Mannering, after leaving Oxford, is travelling alone through some of the wilder parts of Scotland. After losing his way at nightfall, he is directed to Ellangowan, the home of Mr Godfrey Bertram at the time of the birth of Henry Bertram. By request of the father of a newborn baby, Guy made a horoscope in which the child was predetermined the ordeals from the fifth to...