Kipling: Conan Doyle: Ferrante

    Trolling around in the free I-books for my I-Pad, I came across "Captains Courageous" (yes: the plural is right) by Rudyard Kipling. I downloaded it to my I-pad for my elliptical training sessions, thinking I would like some relief from Holmes and Watson in their series of extremely far-fetched 'adventures' that strain credulity--as did Holmes' deductive powers. Would a snake (the 'speckled band') really crawl down a vertical bell-pull? Can Holmes really recognize the mud on someone's shoes as coming from a particular region of Kent? Et cetera, et cetera...
    But reading the Kipling, I was struck by the vast knowledge that the book displayed of commercial fishing off the north-east coast of the United States and Canada, and what seemed like his intimate knowledge of every part of the sailing schooners from hemp ropes to mizzens to capstans and on and on. As if the novel set out to demonstrate just how much technical knowledge he had. 
    As background,  the story concerns a rich and spoiled boy, Harvey Cheyne, the son of a US multimillionaire,  who was washed into the sea from an ocean liner and was rescued by a fishing boat, where his character is greatly improved by the hard work and discipline of being a ship's boy on a fishing vessel for weeks at sea. 
    As for Kipling's technical knowledge--well, in this day and age, Wikipedia is only a click of a mouse away. Kipling spent four years in Vermont, from 1892 to 1896 and during that time he wrote the Jungle books and some other well-known works, including "Captains Courageous." And lo--here was the explanation of the technical knowledge, in Kipling's own words:

"Now our Dr. James Conland had served in the Gloucester fleet when he was young. One thing leading to another, as happens in this world, I embarked on a little book which was called Captains Courageous. My part was the writing; his the details. This book took us (he rejoicing to escape from the dread respectability of our little town) to the shore-front, and the old T-wharf of Boston Harbour, and to queer meals in sailors’ eating-houses, where he renewed his youth among ex-shipmates or their kin. We assisted hospitable tug-masters to help haul three- and four-stick schooners of Pocahontas coal all round the harbour; we boarded every craft that looked as if she might be useful, and we delighted ourselves to the limit of delight. ... Old tales, too, he dug up, and the lists of dead and gone schooners whom he had loved, and I revelled in profligate abundance of detail—not necessarily for publication but for the joy of it. ...I wanted to see if I could catch and hold something of a rather beautiful localised American atmosphere that was already beginning to fade." 

When the fishing boat had finished its season, and Harvey's parents  (I seem to have minimal control over the size of the font, damn it) had been telegraphed that he was alive, they came by train across the United States from San Francisco, and Kipling used other specialized knowledge to describe the trip.

Kipling recalled:

"When, at the end of my tale, I desired that some of my characters should pass from San Francisco to New York in record time, and wrote to a railway magnate of my acquaintance asking what he himself would do, that most excellent man sent a fully worked-out time-table, with watering halts, changes of engine, mileage, track conditions and climates, so that a corpse could not have gone wrong in the schedule."

The Wikipedia article continues:

"The resulting account, in Chapter 9, of the Cheynes' journey from San Diego to Boston, is a classic of railway literature."

    So I am looking forward to that...

    But, I now have the third Ferrante novel, and I am devouring it voraciously, with an occasional break for a few pages of the the graphic version of Swann's Way--which is fun, although the graphic renderings of the characters in conversations at soiree after soiree do become a bit boring. The first part "Combray'' was much more vividly artistic, as is the third part, "Place Names: The Name."