Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 09, 2012 at 11:13:59 user ACB.
As usual when posting, cautiously, on Tarboard, I do not know whether what seems to me to be a bright new hypothesis was exploded long ago and is all old hat now.
I have been thinking about the literary and physical origins of "Peter Duck", keeping in mind AR;s usual way of working, and this is what I come up with:
Setting off to the Caribbees on a schooner and looking for pirate treasure, whilst dealing with piratical villains: Treasure Island
The "Wild Cat" as a Baltic schooner - AR's time in the Baltic.
Peter Duck - Captain Sehmel
The Mates as cooks - Evgenia aboard Racundra.
Treasure hunting on tropical islands and sailing a small boat in big seas - EF Knight.
So far so well travelled territory.
But why would AR think of setting off to find buried trasure as something that might seem vaguely plausible in 1931?
I would now like to chuck in here Bob Roberts' "Rough and Tumble" - two young men setting off to find the Keeling Cocos treasure in a yacht and losing the boat - except that it was published in 1935 and the adventure itself took place in 1933-34.
However, what this does show is that the idea of doing what the characters in Peter Duck actually do was not alien to the yachting fraternity in the twenties and thirties.