Editor’s note. “The Ghost Ship” was published by Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd., of London. It was not registered in the British Copyright Libraries, so it is hard to gauge its date, but it appears to be 1901 at latest. This is judged by the content, which is late nineteenth century, with several references to the current monarch being Queen Victoria, and by the fact that the books advertised on the back pages, date from between 1877 and 1901. The subject matter is nautical, and here we have another puzzle: throughout the book there are many examples of seaman’s language, correctly used, yet there are several gross examples of its misuse. For example, a vessel is said to have travelled a distance of 60 knots. A knot is a speed of one nautical mile per hour, and not a distance. In another place a vessel sets a course of south by south, which is meaningless, and should have read (and now does) south-west. In yet another place a vessel heads a course of south by east, having cleared Ushant, in order to keep clear of the Casquettes Rocks, much further up the English Channel. It certainly would keep clear of them, because the vessel would have been well and truly wrecked on the Brittany coast before many minutes were up: the course should have been nothing south of north-east, if going with the ebb, perhaps a point north of that if going with the flood. From this we conclude that Mr. Hutcheson, though an excellent and prolific writer, and accustomed to shipboard life, is not very good on his pilotage!

He explains in the course of the rather gripping story, his theory of the origins of the Sargasso Sea. It happens that I have been in a ship that lost engine power for several days, during which we became engulfed in the Sargasso Sea, so I was most interested in this theory, which seems more sensible than the explanation usually given.

I thought from the fact that the earliest book by this author in the list we give elsewhere is dated 1867, that he might have been born about 1840, and that turned out to be exactly the case. He was born in St. Helier, Jersey, in mid 1840. He died in Portsea, Hampshire, England either at the end of 1896 or early in 1897. This information came from the Registers of Births, Deaths and Marriages.