
A weary French seaman writes to an old friend, recounting a restless summer voyage that began in New Orleans and headed toward Liverpool with a cargo of cotton. The crew battles scorching heat, a broken propeller shaft, and makeshift repairs that test their ingenuity and temper, while the restless captain, Fourgues, barks orders amid the cramped decks. As they finally slip into the Irish Sea, the foggy night brings an unexpected encounter with a hostile destroyer, its flashing lights and booming guns turning a routine passage into a tense standoff.
The narrative captures the claustrophobic life aboard the Pamir, the camaraderie of sailors coping with fever, quinine, and endless seas, and the uneasy uncertainty of a world still at war. Through vivid, almost cinematic detail, listeners are drawn into the ship’s liminal space—caught between the promise of safety and the sudden threat of enemy fire—setting the stage for a gripping maritime adventure.
Language
fr
Duration
~5 hours (345K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
France: Payot, 1917,pubdate 1918.
Credits
Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
Release date
2022-01-28
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects

1882–1939
A French naval officer who turned life at sea into lively fiction, he wrote adventurous, sharply observed stories that often drew on his maritime experience. His work helped bring the world of the navy to a broad popular audience in the early 20th century.
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