Showing results for "The Long Voyage" in Literature & Fiction

Lee's parents and their business partner, Gordon, found a class A habitable planet. They thought their quest as explorers was over and they'd live a life of ease. But before they could return and register their claim, Lee's parents died doing a survey of the surface. That left Lee two-thirds owner of the claim and their partner Gordon obligated by his word with her parents to raise Lee. She had grown up aboard the ship with her uncle Gordon and he was the only family she'd ever known. Him adopting her was an obvious arrangement to them.

This is a classic short story written by acclaimed author Charles Dickens about a significant shipwreck. However, perhaps this is more an allegory of life's journey than a maritime adventure. It may just be that listeners will think more about their own life courses and how they relate to others in the end.

The story concerns a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten." Some of the books he has read concern Christopher Columbus, James Bruce who searched for the source of the Nile, John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic.

In 1768, John Long set out from Gravesend in England, bound for Canada and a position as a clerk. Quickly developing an affection for the First Nations people he encountered, he determined to learn native languages and thereby make him useful in the 'Indian Trade' living first among Mohawks at Cahnuaga (Kahnawake) and later, among Ojibwa and Cree people north of Lake Superior. Long's journal provides a thrilling depiction the life of a fur trader in the late 18th century. It is a dangerous world, where starvation, torture, murder, war, disease and misfortune are constant threats.