The Welcome back everyone to

the one thousand one classic short stories and tales. The April 30th

1898 issue of the Publishers Weekly announced the publication of The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure.

Its author Stephen Crane was 27 years old at the time. His novella, Maggie, a girl of the streets, had been published only five years earlier.

The Red Badge of Courage came two years after that.

The title story of the Open Boat is based on Crane's real life experience while serving as a journalist corresponding from the Cuban War of Independence.

The steamship on which he was traveling, the SS Commodore, hit a sandbar and sank. Crane was one of the last to escape. Ass reported the disaster made the front page of the newspaper three days after the rescue.

Though the open boat was inspired by a true event, the story is fictional.

It follows four characters as they try to find their way back to land after their disaster at sea.

Only one character is named, the Euler, Billy.

Billy is the strongest of the group and the one Crane wrote most sympathetically about.

And now our story, The Open Boat by Stephen Crane, Part 1.

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them.

These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were a foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea.

The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and that all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed

thrust up in points like rocks.

Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves

were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall and each proth top was a

problem in small boat navigation. The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale that separated him from the ocean.

His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he

bent to bail out the boat. Often he said, God, that was a narrow clip, as he remarked that he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea

The oiler steering with one of the two oars in the boat sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that

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