Man Overboard! ♦ By Winston Churchill ♦ Horror & Supernatural Fiction ♦ Full Audiobook
Title: Man Overboard!
Author: Winston Churchill [ Ссылка ]
Genre(s): Horror & Supernatural Fiction, Short Story
Language: English
Read By: Newgatenovelist
Librivox Recording
Summary:
Churchill’s first piece of published fiction, Man Overboard! appeared in January 1899. Ronald Cohen’s bibliography dates its writing to March 1898. In late March or early April, Churchill sent a draft to General Ian Hamilton: “The story I send you as it may amuse you for an hour….”
Dr. Paul Alkon (in his scholarly work Winston Churchill’s Imagination) describes Man Overboard! as “justly forgotten,” including Henry Austin’s melodramatic drawings, one suggesting an 1899 version of “Jaws.” Alkon quips that the story “quickly sank out of sight, taking down with it Austin’s pictures.” It does leave us with a glimpse of the shipboard life and song that Churchill enjoyed in those days.
The possibility of falling overboard probably occupied our author’s mind during his progresses up and down the Red Sea, en route or returning from India or South Africa. We can conceive of his vivid imagination conjuring what might happen if someone accidentally fell in: the fading music, the dimming light as the ship pulls away, the despair of the victim. The story manifests that streak of fatalism Churchill always carried with him.
The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that young Winston himself had felt the sensation when a boat pulls away, from his boyhood adventure on Lake Geneva, with his brother Jack. After they had dived for a swim off a rowboat, a light breeze began to blow the boat away from them. “I saw Death as near as I believe I have ever seen him,” Churchill wrote his autobiography. “He was swimming in the water at our side, whispering from time to time in the rising wind which continued to carry the boat away from us at about the same speed we could swim. No help was near. Unaided we could never reach the shore….I now swam for life….I scrambled in, and rowed back for my companion who, though tired, had not apparently realised the dull yellow glare of mortal peril that had so suddenly played around us.” Summary by The Churchill Project [ Ссылка ]
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