Adventure · Coming of age
Captains Courageous
A spoiled rich boy falls off an ocean liner and must earn his keep on a fishing schooner.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Overboard
Harvey Cheyne is fifteen, rich, rude and bored on a liner crossing the Atlantic. Feeling sick after a cigar he shouldn’t have smoked, he leans over the rail and falls into the sea. A Portuguese fisherman picks him up and takes him aboard the We’re Here, a schooner fishing for cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The captain, Disko Troop, doesn’t believe a word about Harvey’s millionaire father and won’t turn back for months. So Harvey works, for ten and a half dollars a month. Rudyard Kipling wrote it while living in Vermont, and it appeared in 1897.
Why it works for learners
It’s a short book about learning a job, which makes it a book about learning words. Harvey arrives knowing nothing about fishing and has to pick up every term, task and custom from the crew, so you learn alongside him. The vocabulary is practical: fish, nets, lines, salt, knives, fog, watches, meals. Harvey’s slow change from brat to crewman gives the story a clear shape, and his friendship with Disko’s son Dan is easy and funny.
The fishermen in the original speak a thick New England dialect that can be hard going even for native readers. The story doesn’t depend on it, which is why it works so well at lower levels.
Which level to start at
B1 is ideal, and A2 works for a confident beginner. If you’re reading in English at C1 or C2, expect plenty of Gloucester dialect and sailing terms; tap them and keep going.
Read next
- The Sea-Wolf, a much darker apprenticeship at sea
- Treasure Island, another boy among sailors
- The Jungle Book, Kipling’s most famous book