[ Ballantyne / The Red Eric; or, The Whaler's Last Cruise ]
Ballantyne (1825 - 1894) was a popular and prolific Scottish writer of adventure tales for boys, and was a significant influence on Robert Louis Stevenson. Ballantyne, from a family of writers and publishers, was also a painter of some note.
In this sea-adventure novel, first published in 1861 (London: Rutledge, Warne, and Routledge), Ballantyne describes the aftermath of a gale that destroys a hut used by some shipwrecked sailors and blows some of the men into the sea. The survivors straggle back to land:
Some of the men who had faced the dangers to which they had been exposed with firm nerves and unblanched cheeks, now grew pale, and trembled violently, for they actually believed that the spirits of their lost shipmates had come to haunt them. But these superstitious fears were soon put to flight by the hearty voice of the harpooner, who shook himself like a great Newfoundland dog as he came up, and exclaimed —
"Why, wot on airth has brought ye all here?"