Ahoy there, mateys! Today Top Ten Tuesday’s theme be “Water”, so we’ll be lookin’ at me favorite stories of the seven seas, both fiction and otherwise! Hope ye have your sea legs about ye! Oh, but first — a wee bit of teasin’.

“No doubt about it,” the guy said. “Hypostasis is clear in both corpses.” He looked at me. Wanted me to ask him what hypostasis was. I knew what it was, but I felt polite. So I looked puzzled for him. “Postmortem hypostasis,” he said. “Lividity.”

The Killing Floor, Lee Child

(1) The Sea Wolf. My favorite Jack London novel, childhood attachment to The Call of the Wild aside. A perfectly nice but largely useless effete is swept overboard from a passenger ship, and picked up by a whaler. After accepting that he won’t be going home immediately, Humpfrey gets his Captains Courageous act on and grows to be a man in full — one whose physical strength and technical aptitude become just as developed as his intellectual powers and cultural graces. This isn’t just an adult Courageous, though, because London has Humpfrey pitted against Wolf Larsen, a man who wants to embody the Nietzschean ubermensch, and they spar both intellectually and then physically as the book progresses. I owe this one a re-read!

(2) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. A Narnian adventure at sea, this opens with that classic line, “There was a boy named Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”. The kings and queens of Narnia are attempting to rescue some allies scattered hither and yon, abandoned to fates like being turned into dragons and the like. This introduced the original mighty mouse, Reepicheep. Quite fun!

(3) Sphere, Michael Crichton. One of the creepiest SF novels I’ve ever read. The US military discovers a unique craft deep on the ocean floor, and the suspense of exploring it — and evaluating what it means — is made all the more gripping by the inherent dangers and mysteries of the Deep.

(4) The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. This is a large photo book with information about the endless forms most beautiful and (apologies to Darwin) most weird in the lightless depths of the ocean.

(5) Deep Seas and Foreign Going | 99% of Everything, Rose George. A journalist explores the strange and un-ignorable world of oceanic shipping — its unique labor setup, and the eerie fact that these huge ships are largely automated and empty of human activity, with very small crews.

(6) Collapse Depth, Todd Tucker. A short technical thriller part of a series of the same, this combines technical issues, politics, and a mentally distressed crewman. I’ve never read a technical thriller set on a submarine (no, not even The Hunt for Red October), so I thoroughly enjoyed learning about both the operations of nuclear subs, and the training of officers — who, going by Tucker’s account, are responsible for knowing every detail of how a sub works and might fail, rotating from department to department to become familiar with operations.

(7) The Armada, Garrett Mattingly. The best history of the abortive Spanish invasion of England, frustrated by weather, logistics issues, and the Royal Navy.

(8) John Stack’s Roman navy books. A reccommendation from Cyberkitten ages ago. Throughout his trilogy, we see Rome take to the seas to fight Carthage, improvising so Rome can use her strengths in a new arena to defeat the Republic’s most dangerous foe.

(9) Max Hennessey’s naval fiction, especially The Lion at Sea. I enjoy the historical and technical parts of his stories, but Hennessey is a stirring and hilarious writer at the same time.

‘You are a wart,’ the sub-lieutenant of the gunroom had told him firmly. ‘An excrescence. An ullage. A growth. You probably imagine that when signalled “House your topmast”, you should reply, “fine, how’s yours?” and doubtless the only time you’ll show any enthusiasm for the navy will be on full-belly nights when we’re entertaining visitors.’

(10) Horatio Hornblower. You didn’t think I’d end with anything else, did ya? A young man sent to prove himself as a midshipman finds a career of purpose and adventure after the French start revolting and trying to take over Europe. Turned into a Gregory Peck movie and an exciting A&E series featuring all manner of talent, from Ioan Gruffyd to David Warner. (Cheers to Warner for introducing me to “Spanish Ladies”. Have you lived until you’ve heard him RANT and ROAR like a true British sailor? Well, you probably have — but listening to Warner would make your life better.)