Captains Courageous - Plot

Plot

Harvey Cheyne is the son of a wealthy railroad magnate and his wife, who are over-indulgent parents in San Diego, California. Washed overboard from a transatlantic steamship and rescued by fishermen off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the young Harvey Cheyne cannot persuade them to take him quickly to port, nor convince them of his wealth. Disko Troop, captain of the We're Here, offers him a job as part of the crew until they return to port. With no other choice, Harvey accepts.

Through a series of trials and adventures, the youth learns to adjust to his rough new life and, with the help of his friend, the captain's son Dan Troop, he makes progress. Eventually, the schooner returns to port and Harvey wires his parents. They rush cross-country by their private rail car, given priority over commercial traffic, to Boston, Massachusetts. From there they go to the fishing town of Gloucester to find that their son has matured to become an industrious, serious and considerate young man.

Harvey's mother rewards the seaman who initially rescued her son. Harvey's father rewards Captain Troop by hiring his son Dan to work on his prestigious tea clipper fleet. He is delighted at his son's new maturity and their relationship improves, even as Harvey decides to begin his career with his father's shipping lines.

Read more about this topic:  Captains Courageous

Famous quotes containing the word plot:

    James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.”
    James Thurber (1894–1961)

    The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.
    Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    “The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.
    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)