Redburn

A gentleman's son with no money signs on as a boy before the mast for the Liverpool run, and finds that the sea is a trade like any other, staffed by men who despise him. Melville wrote it in ten weeks for money, called it beggarly work done to buy tobacco, and produced the truest account of a first voyage in American literature — the starving family in the Liverpool cellar is the passage no reader forgets. Fifty-nine plates, from Charles Brooking's naval snow to Hendrik Willem Mesdag's beach with boats and seashell hunters, keep the salt and sail of the age close at hand.