The Captain’s Cabin is published in support of the successful and transformational charity, Jamie’s Farm.
Through residential farm experience and a rigorous follow-up programme combining farming, family and therapy, Jamie’s Farm acts as a catalyst for change for young people at risk of social and academic exclusion. Those involved with the charity aim to better equip these young people to thrive during secondary school years and beyond – academically, socially and emotionally.
Alexander McCall Smith wrote this short novel, The Captain’s Cabin, based in-part on truth. But he was also inspired by images to be found in the real Captain’s Cabin and drew heavily on his quite remarkable imagination. The sale of the book will contribute to the construction of two cabins for short-term rental on each farm. In turn, the rental income will underwrite the shortfall between the money raised through charitable donations and the contribution made by participating schools. Schools throughout the UK have sent over 7000 children to stay on the farms so far.
The Captain’s Cabin tells the story of Captain Andrew McNair Douglas, who met his wife on the Arcadia in 1893 while she was travelling to India in search of a husband. The scene is depicted in one of the photographs on the wall in the real Captain’s Cabin – situated down a single track road from Lochaline in the west of Scotland, overlooking the Sound of Mull. Their son, Thomas, born in 1900, also became a sea captain. He was educated at a boarding school in Perth, where he was taught by a teacher who died in an avalanche — and whose skis and film projector are also pictured in the book and on the walls of the Captain’s Cabin. Everywhere you look in the cabin, you can find something which is also pictured in the novella.
The novella’s fifty-five pages contain poetry, plot twists and unexpected developments, such as visits by Hemingway to Tobermory and Oban.
Find out more about Jamie’s Farm here.
Not all of the story is made up. “The Captain’s Cabin does in fact exist, as do some of the characters,” McCall Smith writes in the book’s preface. “As for the Captain himself, and his father, I am not so sure, but if he did not exist, then perhaps he should have.”
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Excerpt
"A shilling life," wrote the poet W.H. Auden, "will give you all the facts..."
It will indeed. A short biography will tell you all you need to know about many people, about where they were born, where they lived, and how they earned their living. For most of us, a few sentences will do all that work, will set out with sufficient clarity the landscape of our life, showing its saliences, its small moments of triumph, its feel, its texture. Others may require slightly more, but, event then, a biography does not have to run to hundreds of pages to do justice to its subject.
So what will a shilling life tell us about the Captain?...
