with Leatherstocking stand those Indian
characters which the genius of Cooper immortalized and which have
passed into history as typical.

Cooper began the tales without any thought of making a series, but the
overwhelming success of _The Pioneers_, the first which appeared, led
him to produce book after book until the whole life of the hero was
illustrated.

Cooper's series of sea novels began with _The Pilot_, published
in 1824. It followed _The Pioneers_, and showed the novelist to be
equally at home on sea and land. In his stories of frontier life,
Cooper followed the great Scott, whose thrilling tales of Border life
and of early English history had opened a new domain to the novelist.
Cooper always acknowledged his debt to the great _Wizard of the
North_, and, indeed, spoke of himself as a chip of Scott's block. But
in his sea stories Cooper was a creator. He was the first novelist to
bring into fiction the ordinary, every-day life of the sailor afloat,
whether employed on a peaceful merchant vessel or fighting hand
to hand in a naval battle. And it is interesting to know that the
creation of the sea story was another debt that he owed to Scott,
though in a far different way. Scott's novel, _The Pirate_, had been
criticised by Cooper as the work of a man who had never been at sea.
And to prove it the work of a landsman he began his own story, _The
Pilot_. The time chosen is that of the Revolution, and the hero is the
famous adventurer John Paul Jones, introduced under another name.
It was so new a thing to use the technicalities of ship life, and to
describe the details of an evolution in a naval battle, that, familiar
as he was with ocean life, Cooper felt some doubts of his success.
To test his power he read one day to an old shipmate that now famous
account of the passage of the ship through the narrow channel. The
effect was all that Cooper hoped. The old sailor fell into a fury of
excitement, paced up and down the room, and in his eagerness for a
moment lived over again a stormy scene in his own life. Satisfied with
this experiment Cooper finished the novel in content.

_The Pilot_ met with an instant success both in America and Europe.
As it was his first, so it is, perhaps, his best sea story. Into it
he put all the freshness of reminiscence, all the haunting memories
of ocean life that had followed him since his boyhood. It was
biographical in the same sense as _The Pioneers_. A part of the
romance of