Walter Farley · 1941 · sea

Walter Farley's 1941 classic, the first of a beloved series. Returning by steamer from visiting his uncle in India, the boy Alec Ramsay is shipwrecked in a storm and washed up on a deserted island with a wild black Arabian stallion. Boy and horse survive together until they are rescued, and the long voyage home to New York turns the Black into a legend. The route runs from Bombay across two oceans to America.

1. 1
   Bombay

   Alec Ramsay boards the tramp steamer Drake at Bombay after a summer with his uncle, bound for England and then home to New York - the hold full of coffee, rice, tea and jute, and the Arabian Sea ahead.

2. 2
   The Red Sea

   At an Arabian port on the way north the Drake takes on a passenger nobody wants: a wild black stallion that has to be forced up the gangway, and which Alec starts visiting at night with lumps of sugar.

3. 3
   Alexandria

   Through the canal into the Mediterranean and the first of the ports Farley lists by name - the long, ordinary middle of a voyage, in which a boy makes friends with a horse through the bars of a stall.

4. 4
   Bengasi

   Bengasi on the Libyan coast, the second of the Drake's calls - a tramp steamer working her way west along Africa, taking cargo where she finds it and in no particular hurry.

5. 5
   Tripoli

   Tripoli, and by now Alec can get close enough to touch the Black - the friendship that will save both their lives being built in harbours, at anchor, over several weeks of doing nothing much.

6. 6
   Tunis

   Tunis, where the coast turns north and the run home begins to feel short - Captain Watson telling Alec they will be in England within a fortnight.

7. 7
   Algiers

   Algiers is the last African port. From here the Drake stands out for the strait, and everything in the book up to this point has been an ordinary voyage that happens to have a horse on it.

8. 8
   Gibraltar

   Past the Rock and out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic swell, turning north for the coast of Portugal - and into the weather that has been waiting for them the whole voyage.

9. 9
   Cape Finisterre

   Off Cape Finisterre, a few days from England, the Drake is struck by lightning and breaks apart. The lifeboats founder. Alec goes over the side with a rope around the Black, and the horse tows him clear.

10. 10
    The Island

    They wash ashore on an uninhabited island, and survive on seaweed, carragheen moss and rainwater - and it is here, with nobody watching and nothing else to do, that a boy learns to ride an unbroken stallion.

11. 11
    Rio de Janeiro

    Picked up at last by a passing freighter, and Alec refuses to leave without the Black - so the two of them come into Rio together, and the story of the boy and the horse gets into the newspapers.

12. 12
    New York

    Home to New York, where nobody quite believes the Black exists until he is standing in a suburban barn - and a horse with no papers and no name has to be got onto a racetrack somehow.