Woods Hole, 1910: idling steam trains exhale vapor at regular intervals, buoys clang out in the channel. An 11-year-old boy from Oak Park, Ill., wanders about the dockside. It is the first time he has seen the ocean. A sidewheel steamer is docked perpendicular to the rail terminus — its superstructure casts shadows across the kiosks and cottage industries of the wharf. The New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Steamboat Company, consolidated from several small companies when the railroad arrived in 1873, has an office at the dockside. The tops beams of icehouses are just visible up the hill in the distance toward Falmouth.

The boy on the pier a century ago was Ernest Hemingway. He had traveled with his mother by train, via Boston, to meet the boat to the Islands. After a transit stop in Oak Bluffs, the steamer went on to Nantucket, where the two would spend several weeks touring. They went sailing, swimming and fishing, and visited the sites. While Hemingway is often associated with the islands of Cuba, Key West and Bimini, his visit to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket also had an important role in his development as a writer. The following year, in April 1911, the sixth-grader would write the following tale. It is his earliest surviving work of fiction, titled My First Sea Vouge.

I was born in a little white house on the Island of Marthas Vineyard in the State of Massachuset. My mother died when I was four years old and my father, a captain of the three masted schooner “Elizabeth” took me and my little brother around the “Horn” with him to Australia.

Going we had fine weather and we would see the porpoises playing around the ship and the big white albatross winging its way across the ocean or following the brig for scraps of food; the sailors caught one on a huge hook baited with a biscuit but they let him go as soon as they had caught him for they are very superstitious about these big birds.

One time the sailors went out on a barrel fastened to the bow sprit and speared a porpoise (or sea pig as they call them) and hauled him up on deck and we had it fried for supper it tasted like pork only it was greesier.

We arrived in Sydney Australia after a fine vouge and had just as good vouge going back.

His imagination stirred by this trip to the Islands, Hemingway went on to spend much of his life on the water. He would cross the Atlantic eight times in the 1920s (coming to and from his Paris residence), moving to Key West in 1928 and then to San Francisco de Paula, Cuba in 1939. His novels set at sea, To Have and Have Not, Islands in the Stream, and The Old Man and the Sea — which won the Pulitzer in 1952 — are among the most distinguished maritime writings in American Literature. Ernest Hemingway received the Noble Prize for literature in 1954.

Jeffrey Herlihy is a founder’s fellow of the Ernest Hemingway Society. He is an assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico and a native of Falmouth.