This eerie story [The Dark Canoe] is set on board a nineteenth-century vessel outward bound from Nantucket. At the start, the captain has apparently been murdered. He was the favourite brother of the cabinboy-narrator Nathan: golden Jeremy, in every way a contrast to lame scarred Caleb their eldest brother, who keeps to his cabin, having lost his captain's papers on Jeremy's evidence that he mishandled the ship-wrecked whaler for which they are searching….

This powerful story creates splendidly the sense of suspicion after the murder, of greed and suppressed mutiny on board, and Nathan's troubled realization that his brothers are exactly the opposite of what he thought them.