This novel is mentioned in Dashiell Hammett's story "The Gutting of Couffignal," in Hammett's postumous collection _The Big Knockover_ (1962). The master of detective fiction has one anonymous detective of the Continental Op. Agency reading the book for a long of night of guarding wedding presents in the island of Couffignal. "The book was called _The Lord of the Sea_," Hammett wrote, "and had to do with a stong, tough and violent fellow named Hogarth, whose modest plan was to hold the world in one hand. There were plots and counterplots, kidnapings, murders, prisonbreakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime." To call this scientific romance "as real as a dime" sounds flattering enough for me.