Featured Books
True Colours by Alaric Bond
Schooner: Building a Wooden Boat on Martha's Vineyard by Dunlop & Shaw
Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships by W. H. Bunting
His Majesty's Ship by Alaric Bond
Galveston's the Elissa: The Tall Ship of Texas by Kurt Voss
My River Chronicles - Rediscovering the America on the Hudson by Jessica DuLong
The Frigate Surprise: The Complete Story of the Ship Made Famous in the Novels of Patrick O'Brian by by Geoff Hunt and Brian Lavery
James Nelson's George Washington's Secret Navy
Defying Empire:Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas Truxes
Deadly Shoals, a Wiki Coffin Mystery by Joan Druett
Star Crossedby Linda Collison
The Privateer's Revenge: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures)
Peter Wicked: A Matty Graves Novel (The Matty Graves Novels)
The Jackass Frigate byAlaric Bond
Steady As She Goesby John Molloy
Voyages, the Age of Sail: Documents in American Maritime History, Volume I, 1492-1865
Expedition Whydah: The Story of the World's First Excavation of a Pirate Treasure Ship and the Man Who Found Her
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge
The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
The ‘impossible’ voyage of a Tamil ghost ship
Despite all odds, earlier this month, 492 Tamil refugees arrived in Vancouver in an old and barely seaworthy ship, then named the Sun Sea. The Tamil Ghost ship, as she has been dubbed, had been intermittently tracked by the maritime authorities of various nations as she made her way from Thailand to Canada, changing names and registries along the way. The [...]
Schooner Amistad Returns to Mystic for Repairs after Rigging Failure
After suffering what was described as “serious rigging failure” in heavy seas off the Florida coast last week, the schooner Amistad has returned to Mystic, CT for repairs. She is expected to “be there for some time.” The Amistad was built at Mystic Seaport between 1998 and 2000. The Amistad was scheduled to participate in the 2010 Great [...]
Animated Knots and Marlinspike Sailors
For those wishing to learn just a bit about sailor’s knots, Animated Boating Knots by Grog is a lot of fun. Here is a rolling hitch, a marvelously useful knot that I invariably forget how to tie whenever a need one. If you need to climb a halyard, tie a warping line to an anchor rode, or [...]
My Quest for Catharpins
“Ignorance of the crosscatharpins is not necessarily fatal. Explanation almost certainly would be.”
Patrick O’Brian.
The cliché goes that there are two types of people – those who believe that there are two types of people and those who don’t. There are no doubt many more than two types of types of readers of nautical fiction. Nevertheless my guess is that as it applies to jargon, there may indeed be only two types.
The first type, and probably the smarter of the two, are those who read the jargon and let the words wash over them like a breaking wave, catching what they can in context but not caring too very much if they understand the finer points of rigging an eighteenth century ship, or, as is often the case in Patrick O’Brian’s books, the lost art of English suet puddings with exotic names like “drowned baby” and “spotted dick”. Their approach is like that of reading the more technical sub-genres of science fiction, where one need not necessarily understand quantum physics to enjoy the story. (Indeed, I suspect too much understanding of the science might get in the way.)
