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Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember
with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without
however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the
Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and
it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth
of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence
of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in the story is
also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to
another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which
certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to
the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature
of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow
upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.
Of The Informer and An Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The
pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth
disentangling at this distance of time.


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