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The writer of this book, Malcolm Logan Stevenson, was born in the year 1891. On the death of his father, in 1895, the boy came under the care of his uncle, Sir Lionel Cope, the greater part of his boyhood being spent at Courton Hall in West Sussex. He was educated at Winchester and New College. Throughout his life his financial position was such as to cause him no anxiety; he was, in fact, a man of very considerable estate.

As a young man he displayed little enthusiasm for any form of regular occupation, in marked distinction to his later life. His interests at that time were essentially in things adventurous rather than academic. From Oxford he joined the ill-fated Catter-Delina expedition to the Amazon, leaving this country for Para in the autumn of 1911. He returned to England with the survivors of that party in the spring of 1913 and devoted himself with some energy to the sport of yacht cruising, an exercise to which he was much attached. In the winter of 1913 he commenced a desultory study of the economic factors affecting commercial ships and shipping, spending some months upon the Clyde. Previous to the war, however, he made no venture in this business.

In September, 1914, he was granted a commission as Sub-Lieutenant in the RNVR, and served upon minesweepers until the summer of 1917, principally in the Channel and the Irish Sea. During this period his vessel was twice mined; in the second of these explosions he lost the third and fourth fingers of his left hand.

In September, 1917, he was promoted to Lieutenant and was posted to a so-called mystery ship, the Jane Ellen, of Bideford, under Commander D. A. Faulkner, RN. This vessel was a coastal schooner of some one hundred and fifty tons, normally trading in china clay and coal between the southern ports of Cornwall and the north-east coast. Under Commander Faulkner she was employed as a submarine decoy.

The action of the Jane Ellen (HMS Q 83) will be found described in a supplement to the London Gazette published shortly after the Armistice, together with the list of awards. Sir Arthur Mortimer, in the second volume of his ‘Naval History of the Great War’, gives a reliable account of the engagement, which he refers to as ‘one of the bloodiest naval actions ever fought’. Briefly, the Jane Ellen engaged the U187 at dawn, on April 18th, 1918, at a point some forty miles west of the Scillies. Casualties on the British vessel were extremely heavy and included the Commander, the ship’s company of forty-seven being reduced eventually to three in number. Finally the U187 was sunk by gunfire at about noon, the gun being manned by Lieutenant Stevenson and a midshipman. No survivors were rescued from the German vessel.

As a result of this action Stevenson was promoted to Lieutenant-Commander; he was then about twenty-seven years of age. Injuries to his lungs, aggravated by exposure, necessitated a prolonged period in hospital subsequent to the action. It would not be beyond the truth to say that these injuries were ultimately responsible for his early death.

In the spring of 1919 Commander Stevenson commenced to build up a fleet of schooners and small ketches which had carried the bulk of the coastwise traffic of this country before the war. At that time these vessels had disappeared almost entirely from British waters. A certain number of them were sold abroad during the war; the remainder were sunk as they carried on their business.

In the years following the war Commander Stevenson repurchased a number of these vessels from their Scandinavian owners and, establishing himself in a shipyard on the River Dart, commenced to operate them in their ancient trade. At the time of his death he was the owner of no less than seventeen of these ships. At the outset this speculation involved him in a financial loss which was severe even for a man of his resources; in later years the losses decreased, and at the time of his death the business was in a fair way to show a profit.

In the settlement of his estate the fleet was broken up, the majority of the vessels being sold abroad again. It is doubtful whether this form of coastwise trading can be regarded as an economic business in these days. It is at least doubtful whether Commander Stevenson cared if it were so or not.

From the year 1919 until his death, ten years later, he lived in the Port House above Dartmouth Harbour, alone but for a housekeeper and a few servants. As the business of his fleet became stereotyped, demanding less of his attention, he showed some inclination to develop his shipyard as a building centre for yachts and small sailing craft of various kinds.

In the winter of last year he died, after a comparatively short illness, at the early age of thirty-nine.

In person, Malcolm Stevenson was a man of medium height; his hair, from the war onwards, was almost completely grey. He walked with a slight limp; he was sensitive to the injury to his left hand, for which reason he usually wore a glove. In temperament he was very taciturn, perhaps bitter. He was popular with his acquaintances but admitted few to friendship; with women he was diffident and shy. He had few interests beyond the sea. For recreation he was accustomed to cruise single-handed, or with at most one friend, in his tenton cutter Runagate; he was a regular competitor in the Ocean Race. He was a member of the Squadron. He held both Master’s and Extra Master’s certificates, and on occasions when he was short of a skipper would sometimes act as Master in one of his own little ships upon a coastal cruise.

He had few relatives, and those few he neglected. His closest tie was with his cousin, Lady Stenning. In the later years of his life he seldom left Dartmouth except to stay at her house in Golders Green, and he became on terms of considerable friendship, if not intimacy, with her husband, Sir Philip Stenning. To Sir Philip he left a very considerable legacy; for the remainder, his testament was eccentric and beyond the scope of this preface.

The book which is now published was written by Commander Stevenson shortly before the illness which terminated in his death. The MS is written in pencil in a foolscap ledger freely interspersed with memoranda of a personal nature; it would seem from internal evidence that the compilation of this book was a relaxation for his leisure hours over a period of about two months.

In the settlement of his estate the MS was read first by the writer of this preface, and later by Sir Philip and Lady Stenning, who confirmed the truth of the account. It seemed desirable, and even necessary, that the facts contained therein should be made public at an early date, for which reason it was first proposed that a condensed and impersonal edition of the narrative should be prepared. Upon a closer investigation, however, it became evident that the task of expurgation would prove to be a most formidable one, and that a great mass of extraneous matter would require to be inserted in explanation of motives which were wholly personal and therefore to be omitted from the book. In these circumstances it has seemed better to publish the MS substantially in the form in which it was discovered, only modifying those names and places which bear too close a relation to the world as it is lived in today.

With this course the relatives of Commander Stevenson are in agreement. I am indebted to Sir Lionel Cope for advice upon matters pertaining to the family, and to Lady Stenning for much assistance in the preparation of the narrative. If the effect of publication in this form should be to indicate a quality of greatness in a man of singular reserve, then the intrusion into his privacy may not be quite unjustified.

T. A. Jenkinson

Messrs. Louden, Jenkinson, and Priestly,

Lincoln’s Inn Fields,

London.