At the beginning of Arthur Conan Doyle's story of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, Dr Watson is found seated at the fire ‘deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories’. A storm is outside, and as he reads, the Doctor feels ‘the howl of the gale … blend with the text’ and ‘the splash of the rain … lengthen out into the long swash of the literary sea waves’. William Clark Russell (1844–1911) was the greatest late Victorian nautical novelist. Author of over forty full-length sea stories published between 1875 and 1905, his stirring ship adventures and poetic sea descriptions were widely admired by his contemporaries. To Edwin Arnold he was ‘the prose Homer of the great ocean’ and to Swinburne ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead’. King George V was another passionate devotee and many other contemporaries, including Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith, read and admired his works. His reputation spread internationally. In America, where he enjoyed an even greater popularity than in his home country, he was seen as a rival to James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. His stories were also translated into several European languages, including Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish and French (oddly, in view of his attitude towards Britain's persistent naval enemy). When Joseph Conrad began his literary career in the 1890s it was Russell who was instantly identified as his progenitor as a writer of sea stories.