I know this much less well than I do many of the other Arthur Ransome books so enjoyed revisiting it and encountering the story without always knowing what was going to happen. I think as a child I characterised this as being similar to Peter Duck and Missee Lee, not invented in the same way but a similar story: a bigger boat, a crew including Captain Flint, a clear antagonist and a somewhat more dramatic storyline. Reading it again it feels like it has resonances of Coot Club, not just for the birdwatching focus, but for the interplay of natives and intruders, those who keep and protect a place and those who bring destruction and damage to it. For a long while in Great Northern? the crew of the Sea Bear risk failing as protectors and being unwitting destroyers instead.

It is the Ransome book that most closely interogates the use of savages to talk about those outside both theirs and the natives ways of living. This interogation feels only partially written for however. While Captain Flint's dismissal of the Gaels as savages and the surety of Nancy that now they have found someone who speaks English everything will be alright do not bring them any real success they are not given a particularly clear counterpoint either. This dismissal coming as it does in anger is hard to writeoff as the characters recreating the modes of stories they have read and shows how those ideas can become normalised into how people think. There is a bit of English exceptionalism in their surety and confidence that they will be listened to and that their actions are justified, and the Gaels and just characters to be manipulated in the story they are telling. While this comes across as an outflow of privilige it can as easily be explained by the fact that they are telling stories as children often do where they are the main characters and this can give a blindness to the inner lives of others. This tension feels deliberately written in a way that it perhaps isn't in any of the other Ransome books. The strength of the Gaels as pround inhabitors of their own land is really well done.

In the midst of this the Swallows, Amazons and Ds are perhaps at their most altruistic too. They have a keen mission, the protection fo the Great Northern Divers and their nest (it was interesting to look up and see that Great Northerns have, very rarely, been known to nest in Scotland). They also have an excellently ammoral villain in Mr Jemmerling whose assumption that everyone is as calculatingly selfish as himself is satisfying to see repeatedly backfire. This speaks to Ransome's generally positive depictions of human nature, there are reletively few 'bad' characters, most have strong moral codes and live by them. It was interesting to find out that egg collecting only became illegal in the UK in 1954, 7 years after this book was published. The attitude towards egg collecting would have been more accepting then making the stand of the children one that would have seemed less automatic than it does to modern readers. It also speaks of the way feeling embattled can mean you view others with cynicism. The crew worry about Mr Jemmerling so they assume the islanders will help as soon as he asks rather than care for the birds in their own right.

It is a good measure of the success of the characters that for many of them you find yourself laughing or sighing along at them being the very epitomy of themselves. In this book Nancy and Roger stood out. Nancy for her endless rambunctious optimism and a will to force the world to her liking is hilariously and exasperatingly confident in the face of capture and her claims that everything has gone perfectly are joyous. Far from making her ridiculous though this confidence allows her to conrive their freedom, that self belief is always a joyous ride. Roger is the other character who delveloped interestingly, his independent instincts - highlighted in Pigeon Post come to the fore here and he is often drawn towards mutiny.

I also really enjoyed the cyclic method of telling the last bit of the story, telling it one perspective at and time and building up a fuller and fuller picture of what is going on. It is a really satisfying way to manage tension, to build up through one character before dropping back down to another and circling into that tense point from another angle. It also gives a nice aura of puzzle, like those detective stories where you start knowing most of what happened and must work out how it came to that, filling in the pieces on the way.