Kipling only visited Gloucester for ten days at the most, spread over four short visits. As he recalled in his autobiography "Something of Myself", he was taken to sea by Dr Conland in a ...pollock fisher, which is ten times fouler than any cod-schooner, and I was immortally sick, though they tried to revive me with a fragment of unfresh pollock.	One of the marvels of Captains Courageous is how RK managed to get so close to the talk and feelings of the Bankers, and the technicalities of life on a fishing schooner, on the strength of a few short visits to Gloucester, and some long chats about old times with Dr Conland. This has been the theme of a recent book about "Kipling in Gloucester" by David C McAveeney.
How was Captain's Courageous written ? Who were the models for Disko Troop, or Harvey Cheyne, or Manuel, or Pennsylvania Pratt, or the black gaelic cook, or Harvey's millionaire father ? How did RK discover how you bait up a line, or take a sight of the sun, or 'dress down' the catch ? How did the wisest skippers find the fish ? What songs did the men sing when they hove to in rough weather ?	What chaff passed between the boats when the fleet gathered around the 'Virgin' rock ? How fast could you get a private railcar from San Diego to Gloucester ? All of this and much else is the theme of David McAveeney's book, which has been greeted by Thomas Pinney, of Pomona College, - the leading Kipling scholar in North America, and editor of the Kipling letters - as 'an absolutely first-rate piece of local history, the outcome of much original research and special knowledge.'