AN UNQUALIFIED PILOT by RUDYARD KIPLING
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A 14 year old boy born to the river in India known as the Hugli wants to follow in his father's footsteps as a boat pilot- but his father wants him to find a safer job. The river is one of the most dangerous in the world to navigate-and when the boy (Jim) agrees to pilot a Chinese ship loaded with coffins downriver, he knows his fate will be decided on way or the other.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And the Yeah, Hello everyone. Stay tuned at the end of this episode for a surprise bonus episode. |
| 0:34.0 | Welcome back everyone to 1001 Classic Short Stories and Tales. |
| 0:39.0 | I'd like to give a big thanks out to our listeners in India, |
| 0:42.0 | whose appreciation for good |
| 0:44.1 | literature has always been evident by the numbers of those who listen to our |
| 0:47.6 | show and have for years. It is to them that we dedicate this story from one of my favorite authors, |
| 0:54.8 | Rudyard Kipling. Like the US, India has its share of rivers, rivers which, |
| 1:01.2 | before the days of trucking, carried the commerce of the country and helped |
| 1:05.0 | to build the India we know today and cities like Calcutta into bustling commercial empires. |
| 1:11.9 | In his unique descriptive and intuitive way, |
| 1:14.3 | Rudyard Kipling in 1895 writes of a boy's experience in piloting boats and barges |
| 1:20.6 | down one of India's most dangerous rivers, the Huguley, following in the |
| 1:24.8 | footsteps of his father as boys are want to do, even though his father wishes him |
| 1:29.4 | to be doing something better. One of the most dangerous rivers in the world is the Hugli. |
| 1:35.0 | It runs swiftly down from Calcutta into the Bay of Bengal, |
| 1:39.0 | through constantly shifting shoals and mudbanks |
| 1:42.0 | which can capsize and swallow a big ship in minutes. |
| 1:46.9 | Our protagonist, Jim, aged 14, is desperate to become a pilot himself and spends all his time on the water and in the harbors, |
| 1:55.0 | making friends among the men who know the river and storing away precious information. |
| 2:00.0 | His father does not encourage him and wants him to become a clerk in an office. |
| 2:05.0 | One day the skipper of a Chinese junk, unwilling to pay the high charges for pilotage, |
| 2:10.0 | asks young Jim to take his craft down the river. |
... |
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