These seafaring tales begin on a street corner where Jim, a retired sailor, spends his days, passing the time telling a curious boy named Derry about life aboard his ship, the Rockinghorse. In the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s and Rudyard Kipling’s , Farjeon’s tales of talking sea serpents and stew-eating chimpanzees bring the far near and turn ordinary weather into an astronomical adventure. With pen-and-ink illustrations by the maritime master artist Edward Ardizzone, is an old-fashioned adventure for the eyes and the ears.