The Long Voyage

The Long Voyage is a New Year's Eve short story by Charles Dickens. It was originally published in the 31 December 1853 issue of "Household Words" magazine.

Plot summary

It is about a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten."

Some of the books he has read concern Christopher Columbus, James Bruce who searched for the source of the Nile, John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic, "Men-selling despots" and the Atlantic slave trade and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer (1771-1806) who wrote "Travels in the Interior of Africa", and other adventure stories. He also touches on the "one awful creature" by the name of Alexander Pearce who escapes from a penal colony on an island - and cannibalizes his fellow escapees. He then tells the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, and of Thursday October Christian, the son of Fletcher Christian, who mutinied against Captain Bligh leaving Bligh to fend for himself on the open sea.

He then reads about the sad fate of the "Halsewell", a shipwreck on the rocks of Seacombe where 160 people died. Captain Pierce stayed to comfort the his daughters, even though he could have saved himself. Finally, he recounts the exciting story of the Grosvenor, an English bound Mercantile ship that ran aground on 4 August 1782 in South Africa - and of the 125 who made it on shore - only 13 survived the trip back to civilization.

After meditating on these stories he comes to a startling realization about "The Long Voyage" looking into the fire on that first of January 1853.

References

*cite web|url=http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2541/|title=The Long Voyage on the Internet

External links

Web Sites concerning the adventures he read about

*cite web|url=http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slaveship.htm | title=Aboard a Slave Ship, 1829

Books of adventures that he read by the fire

*cite web|url=http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring05/032707.htm| title="Caliban's Shore: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Strange Fate of Her Survivors" by Stephen Taylor

Other New Year's Eve Stories by Charles Dickens

*cite web|url=http://charlesdickenspage.com/the_new_year.html | title="The New Year 1836"
*cite web|url=http://www.the-chimes.com/| title="The Chimes" or "A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out & a New Year In"

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