Captains Courageous A Story Of The Grands Banks

Captains Courageous is an 1897 novel, by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The novel originally appeared as a serialisation in McClure’s, beginning with the November 1896 edition with the last instalment appearing in May 1897. In that year it was then published in its entirety as a novel, first in the United States by Doubleday, and a month later in the United Kingdom by Macmillan. It is Kipling’s only novel set entirely in North America. In 1900, Teddy Roosevelt extolled the book in his essay *What We Can Expect of the American Boy,* praising Kipling for describing *in the liveliest way just what a boy should be and do.*

The book’s title comes from the ballad *Mary Ambree*, which starts, *When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt*. Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers, published in The Times of 23 November 1892.