Includes bibliographical references (p. 667-671).

from A true reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight / William Strachey -- from History of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- Of the sea / Roger Williams -- from Magnalia Christi Americana / Cotton Mather -- The wonderful providence of God exemplified in the preservation of William Walling / William Walling -- from The interesting narrative of the life / Olaudah Equiano -- from Peculiar customs at Nantucket / J. Hector St. John Crev̀ecoeur -- from A journal of Captain Cooks last voyage / John Ledyard -- from The journals of the Lewis & Clark expedition / William Clark -- from Journal of a cruise made to the Pacific Ocean / David Porter -- The voyage / Washington Irving -- from A narrative of voyages and travels in the northern and southern hemispheres / Amasa Delano -- from Narrative of the most extraordinary and distressing shipwreck of the whale-ship Essex, of Nantucket / Owen Chase -- from A narrative of the mutiny on board the ship Globe / William Lay and Cyrus M. Hussey -- from The pilot / James Fenimore Cooper -- Old Ironsides / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- from Journal of a young actress / Fanny Kemble -- from A summer cruise in the Mediterranean / Nathaniel Parker Willis -- from Journals / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- MS. found in a bottle / Edgar Allan Poe -- from Two years before the mast / Richard Henry Dana Jr. -- Foot-prints on the sea-shore / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The wreck of the Hesperus / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- from Voyage to the southern ocean / William Reynolds -- from Cape Cod / Henry David Thoreau -- from Mardi ; from White-jacket ; from Moby-Dick ; from Israel Potter ; The tuft of kelp / Herman Melville -- from The opening of Japan / George Henry Preble -- As I ebbd with the ocean of life ; The world below the brine ; A Paumanok picture ; A winter day on the sea-beach ; Sea-shore fancies / Walt Whitman -- from Remarks on board brig Thomas W. Rowland / Mary Rowland -- from In the Monitors turret / Samuel Dana Greene -- from Memoirs of service afloat during the War between the States / Raphael Semmes -- Pearl-hunting in the Pomotous / Charles Warren Stoddard -- from Among the Isles of Shoals / Celia Thaxter -- Betrayed / James H. Williams -- from Chita : a memory of Last Island / Lafcadio Hearn -- from About all kinds of ships / Mark Twain -- The open boat / Stephen Crane --from The voyage of the transports / Richard Harding Davis -- from Sailing alone around the world / Joshua Slocum -- A royal sport / Jack London -- from From sail to steam / Alfred Thayer Mahan -- Ile / Eugene ONeill -- from The big sea / Langston Hughes -- The fish / Marianne Moore -- The headlong wave / Henry Beston -- Cutty Sark / Hart Crane -- After the storm / Ernest Hemingway -- from A descent into perpetual night / William Beebe -- The captains table / Cornelia Otis Skinner -- The story of sailing / James Thurber -- Havana cruise / James Agee -- from Sea of Cortez / John Steinbeck -- Cruising / Alvin Kernan -- The death of Sergeant Alex / Edward V. Rickenbacker -- The Quaker graveyard in Nantucket / Robert Lowell -- At the fishhouses / Elizabeth Bishop -- The marginal world / Rachel Carson -- Under Montauk Light / Peter Matthiessen -- Oil / Gary Snyder -- The bottom of the harbor / Joseph Mitchell -- Product / George Oppen -- The sea and the wind that blows / E.B. White -- An August days sail / Samuel Eliot Morison -- A presentation of whales / Barry Lopez --McPhee.