In these little sketches [1899] of a few out of the innumerable multitude of ways in which the sea has spoken to me during my long acquaintance with it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproduce for shore-dwellers some of the things it has told me. (Author’s Preface)

His whales and sharks and other monsters of the deep are creatures with whom one is proud to be associated. These Idylls—little pictures—strike me as some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea. I take it that only a man who has used the sea as a common sailor, and before the mast, really knows it in all its humours,… It is not conventionally that I have called Mr. Bullen’s work “vivid.” It is of writing such as his that we can say, and say truly: “I watch no longer—I myself am there.”… In spite of the fact that he knows so much science, and makes so keen and convincing a use of this knowledge, there is always an air of mystery and enchantment about his writing…. that a sense of something strange and fateful, and so fascinating, haunts his pictures of the sea. (Introduction)

[Bullen (1857 - 1915)] led a roving and adventurous life from quite an early age, and many of the most thrilling episodes in his books were records of his own experiences. After various adventures on shore he went to sea in 1869, and for some years roughed it in various capacities in the merchant service, suffering great hardships, as vividly described in The Log of a Sea Waif and other books. (Royal Geographic Society Obituary, 1915)