My name is Captain Silas E. Parks, at sea for for 50yrs if a day and soon to retire. I am writing these as they come to me, my memoirs, to give to the world the truth about what has occured during my life. It has been a long career at sea and during these last trips before old age sneaks up I would like to be released from the guilt that has consumed me, be exonerated from certain crimes for which I was wrongly accused and to be let slip from the clutches of the wrong impressions held by my peers and old superiors alike.

By putting down on paper I want to set records straight: my aim through fact not fiction is to change what many perceived was total ineptness on my part, to prove that the amounts of alcohol that I sometimes consumed was necessary for survival and that I never meant to harm those that I did as I navigated my career from Cadet to Captain.

These stories maybe slightly jumbled and out of sequence as I write down the thoughts as they come to me, they might be badly worded and seem to be the ramblings of an over-the-hill seafarer with two screws loose and pickled in gin; and they may seem to be exagerated beyond belief but I make no claim to literary heights and I have no wish to make profits from the sale of these works. I simply want to retire gracefully and with the knowledge that the world knows the truth: that Captain Silas Parks was not responsible for many of the disastrous situations that followed his career and that he was not so damned useless after all.