内容简介：Dick Sand is a fifteen-year-old boy serving as a sailor on the schooner "Pilgrim." The crew are whale hunters that voyage every year down to New Zealand. As they plan their return after an unsuccessful season as the wife of the owner of the firm, Mrs. Weldon asks for a return passage to San Francisco for her five-year-old son Jack her cousin, an entomologist and herself. Several days into the journey they save five shipwrecked passengers from another ship and a dog who was with them at the time. Towards the end of their passage, they notice a whale and the crew, hoping for some profit after a bad season, decide to hunt it. Captain Hull reluctantly leaves Dick responsible for the ship. But the hunt goes awry and all the crew members are killed. Now Dick is left in charge of the ship with no experienced sailors to help him. Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. He was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.