My introduction to William Hope Hodgson was through reading ``The Whistling Room’’, one of the Carnacki stories, in a collection.

I later found the collected ``Carnacki, the Ghost Finder’’, and enjoyed it quite a bit. But I wasn’t sure whether I’d enjoy these ``sea stories’’ or not.

I did. While some of the stories about ships being caught in the weed of the Sargasso Sea and the horrible creatures that set out to harvest their crews got a bit tedious, the Captain Gault stories were fun tales of our clever hero (?) outwitting customs agents on every shore.