Jules Verne 
Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen 

Dick Sand is a fifteen-year-old boy serving on the schooner Pilgrim as a sailor. The crew are whale hunters that voyage every year down to New Zealand. After an unsuccessful season of hunting an entomologist ask for a return passage to San Francisco. Several days into the journey they save five shipwrecked passengers from another ship and a dog who was with them at the time.