On New Year’s Eve 1896, Stephen Crane sailed out from Florida on the Commodore as a correspondent to cover the insurrection of Cuba against Spain. His ship sank a few days later when it hit a sandbar. Crane and three other men spent thirty hours on a dinghy. When they finally arrived to shore, one of the men, the oiler named Billie Higgins, was already dead on the sand. He had drowned when the boat overturned. A few days after, Crane published “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” a newspaper account of the sinking. Stephen Crane’s newspaper account of the sinking of the Commodore and his short story based on the shipwreck, “The Open Boat”, are very similar and very different. Both works are descriptive and detailed and use the same event and
