This is quite a short book, containing five short late Victorian stories. The first of these concerns a monkey on board ship, which was dressed up as an officer, and as such introduced to a visiting Admiral, who invites all the officers to dinner, stressing that he hoped to entertain the one who didn't speak much. The second story is an informative one about icebergs. The third concerns a yachting cruise in the Aegean Sea, among the Greek Islands, in which they save the live of a Greek. There is an encounter with bandits, from which they are surprisingly released without further harm. Why would that be, I wonder. The fourth concerns a "sighting of a sea-serpent of extraordinary dimensions", by HMS Daedalus in 1848. And the fifth is a story about the curious events at a cricket match. (Nick Hodson)According to Wikipedia: "John Conroy Hutcheson (1840- 1897) was a British author of novels and short stories about life aboard ships at sea. Hutcheson was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1840, and died in Portsea Island, in late 1896 or early 1897."