Ellms maximises the drama in part by playing to nineteenth-century stereotypes of savagely violent indigenous peoples. We learn of two survivors of a whale ship wrecked off the Palau Islands being captured and “subjected to unheard-of Sufferings among the barbarous Inhabitants”. Another shipwreck off the coast of East Florida leads to the “MASSACRE OF THE OFFICERS AND PART OF THE CREW by the Seminole Indians.” There is more to the book however than fire and fury, blood and guts. The open ocean is a great stage for displays of fortitude and ingenuity too. An Englishman called James Brock looks certain to die when his yawl capsizes off Yarmouth but manages to swim fourteen bitterly cold miles to safety. The Frigate Pique is extricated by her sailors from a “PERILOUS SITUATION ON THE ROCKS OF LABRADOR, where she lost her Keel; and the Passage across the Atlantic, during which SHE LOST HER RUDDER, AND WAS STEERED FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES WITHOUT ANY.” We learn of a posse of sailors who, after three days trapped in their cramped sleeping quarters in the mid-Atlantic, set themselves free by cutting through the deck itself. Perhaps most extraordinary is the tale of a stray Japanese vessel carried diagonally across the immensity of the Pacific Ocean until by chance it reached the Sandwich Island 11,000 miles and eleven and a half months later. “For the last three months,” Ellms relates “they had been without water: they had a large supply of rice, it being the principal part of the cargo; and they allayed their thirst by washing their mouths and soaking their bodies in salt water.”