We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea

.

First Publication

Published by Jonathan Cape in November, 1936

Availability

In print.

Hardback: Jonathan Cape ISBN 978-0224021234

Paperback: Red Fox ISBN 978-0099427223

E-book: Random House Children’s Books (from 30 June, 2011)

Also available as an abridged audiobook (Gabriel Woolf)

Background

The Ransome’s moved from the Lake District to Suffolk in the late summer of 1935. On 8 September that year he bought his second yacht, a nearly-new 7 ton Hillyard cutter called Electron, then lying in Poole. Ransome renamed her Nancy Blackett, on the grounds that without his best-known fictional character he could never have afforded the yacht. He brought her around to her new home port, Pin Mill.

Both these developments soon paid creative dividends. In January, 1936, he saw, “grabbed, clutched and pinioned a really really gorgeous idea for a new book… Swallows only… No Nancy or Peggy or Captain Flint… but a GORGEOUS idea with a first class climax inevitable and handed out on a plate… So I breath again.”

To research his new story, Ransome sailed Nancy across the North Sea in June, 1936. But otherwise he had to put We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea aside for most of 1936, whilst completing Pigeon Post. Then, during the winter of 1937, he was further distracted by the help he was giving Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock over The Far-distant Oxus.As a result his seventh Swallows and Amazons book wasn’t published until the end of 1937.

Synopsis

John, Susan, Titty and Roger Walker move with their mother and younger sister Brigit to Pin Mill, to await their father’s return to Britain from service overseas. There they befriend Jim Brading, owner of the yacht Goblin, who invites them on a quiet cruise on the River Orwell. All goes well, until a series of events leaves the four Walkers alone and drifting out to sea in a fog.