Posted by Adam Quinan on October 15, 2007 at 01:52:19 from 99.226.247.88 user Adam.
In Reply to: "Wildcat" model posted by David Bamford on October 14, 2007 at 21:46:55:
While Baltic trading schooners may have been common on the east coast, perhaps Ransome met them in the Baltic as he had already invented Wild Cat before he moved to the east coast?
But I would still argue that Ransome's method of story invention seems to have usually required a prototype of some sort, not just a general knowledge of the existence of a class of vessels. Maybe there was a schooner in the Baltic that he became familiar with but I would have expected it to have been mentioned in his diaries or letters.