Old Stormalong

Long ago, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, a baby boy was born who was as big as a whale. His parents named him Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, but everybody called him Stormy.

Stormy grew and grew, and he loved the sea more than anything. He drank his milk from a bathtub and ate his soup from a rowboat. By the time he was a young man, he was so tall that he could see over the masts of every ship in the harbor. He went to sea as a sailor, but every ship was too small for him. His feet stuck out over the side, and when he sneezed, the sails flapped like flags in a storm.

So Stormy built a ship of his own, the biggest ship there ever was. Her name was the Courser, and she was so long that it took a whole day to walk from one end to the other. Her masts were so tall that the sailors had to fold them down to let the moon go by. The sailors rode horses along the deck to get from place to place.

One day, Stormy and his crew went sailing to England. To get there, they had to go through a narrow stretch of sea between England and France. But the Courser was so wide that she got stuck halfway through! The sailors pushed, and they pulled, and they puffed, but the ship would not budge.

“Bring me all the soap on board!” shouted Stormy. The sailors came running with bars of soap, buckets of soap, and barrels of soap. They scrubbed and rubbed soap all along both sides of the ship until she was as slippery as a fish. Then Stormy gave one great push, and whoosh, the Courser slid right through!

As the ship squeezed past, she rubbed against the tall cliffs of Dover on the English shore. All that soap scraped off onto the rocks. That is why, to this very day, the cliffs of Dover are white and shining. And people say the sea foam there is still a little bit bubbly.

Stormy sailed the seven seas for many years after that. When he was old, he went home to Cape Cod and sat on the beach, watching the waves. And sometimes, when a big wind blows over the sea, sailors smile and say, “There goes Old Stormalong!”