Robert Carse (1902-1971) became a Great Lakes sailor at the age of 17 and later worked aboard the merchant fleet, attaining the position of chief mate. He sailed most of the world and developed a reputation as an expert seaman and maritime historian. He claimed to have spent half his life at sea.
Alongside his career at sea, Carse was a pulp fiction author first appearing in 1928 and many of his short stories, serials, articles, and nearly fifty books are nautical.His stories appeared frequently in Argosy magazine and also in The Saturday Evening Post. He also wrote paperback original swashbuckling historical novels and also some non-fiction works. He wrote both children and adults books, and two of his works, There Go the Ships (1942) and A Cold Corner of Hell (1969), are an eyewitness account of his wartime experiences as a merchant seaman aboard the SS Steel Worker as it made its way along the Norwegian coast in a Murmansk Convoy that lost half its ships in 1942.
He was chosen to write the novelisation of a 1961 film starring actor Steve Reeves which became Morgan the Pirate.