I Saw Three Ships and other Winter’s Tales

The schooner raced under bare poles, though a strip or two of canvas streamed out from her fore-yards. Yet she came with a rush like a greyhound's, heeling over the whitened water, close under the cliffs, and closer with every instant. A man, standing on any one of the points she cleared so narrowly, might have tossed a pebble on to her deck.
From 'I Saw Three Ships'
Illustration of an older man talking to a younger man who appears in distress

I Saw Three Ships was Q’s second collection of short stories. It was published in 1892 when Q was an established writer. The stories were probably written on the train as Q travelled between London and Cornwall. This collection shows how much Q owed to his Cornish forebears – the scientific enquiry of the Couches and the sense of another world beyond our five senses of the Quillers.

In this section you will find an introduction to the whole collection and discussion of the individual stories it contains.

You may also be interested in a fuller study of the philosophical context in which these stories were written.

You can read the stories for yourself on the Internet Archive site or download the text from Project Gutenberg.