I Mean, Said the Sea Captain

Book excerpt: This is a collection of sea stories encompassing about fifteen years of the Polish Merchant Marine from the 1920s until 1939. It covers adventures on sailing ships and transatlantic liners, until the tragic sinking of the MS Pilsudski (sometimes called the Polish Titanic), by German torpedoes off the English coast. The collection was published in Poland in 1960 and became a bestseller. It is a beautiful tale written with humor and with insight into the cultures of the exotic lands visited, now translated for the first time into English by Danuta Borchardt. She is the author's daughter, a retired psychiatrist, a writer of fiction in English, and an award-winning translator into English of Witold Gombrowicz's novels and of Cyprian Norwid's poems. She had assistance in the translation of Polish nautical terms into English by Jerzy Tarasiewicz, the author's former student.