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The Open Boat
by Stephen Crane (1897)
A fictionalized account of the author’s experience at sea for 30 hours in a dinghy, “The Open Boat” requires very little modernizing to be fluid for a 21st century reader. Crane’s deft phrasing, too, demands a bias toward preservation. Most changes here are forumlaic, such as color for colour and journalist for correspondent. Otherwise they are made so as to avoid confusions or gaps in meaning not foreseeable by the author or the original audience, and in other cases to adapt to modern usage of symbols, idioms, verbal cadences, preferred variants which may convey tone, etc.
I
None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened on the waves that swept toward them. These waves were slate gray, except for the tops, which were foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.
Plenty of folks likely have bathtubs larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a test in small-boat navigation.
The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the…
