"The Long Voyage" is aNew Year's Eve short story byCharles Dickens. It was originally published in the 31 December 1853 issue ofHousehold Words magazine.
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 concernChristopher Columbus,James Bruce who searched for the source of theNile,John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic, "Men-selling despots" and theAtlantic slave trade, andMungo Park, a Scottish explorer (1771–1806) who wroteTravels in the Interior of Africa and other adventure stories. He also touches on "one awful creature" by the name ofAlexander Pearce who escaped from a penal colony on an island and cannibalized his fellow escapees. He then tells the story of theMutiny on the Bounty, and ofThursday October Christian, the son ofFletcher Christian who mutinied againstCaptain Bligh leaving Bligh to fend for himself on the open sea.
He then reads about the sad fate of theHalsewell, lost in a shipwreck on rocks off theIsle of Purbeck in which 160 people died. Captain Pierce stayed to comfort his daughters, even though he could have saved himself. Finally, he recounts the exciting story of theGrosvenor, an English-bound Mercantile ship that ran aground on 4 August 1782 in South Africa. Of the 125 who made it to shore, only 13 survived the trip back to civilization.
After meditating on these stories he comes to a startling realization aboutThe Long Voyage, looking into the fire on that first of January 1853.
The Long Voyage public domain audiobook atLibriVox
