The Loneliest Whale — Search for 52 : A Review

Joshua Zeman has directed a newly released documentary, The Loneliest Whale — the Search for 52. It is a fascinating muddle of a film, well worth watching if you can overlook the mix of myth, legend, and social media sentimentality … Continue reading

Nautical Coincidence & Lifeboat Morality – Richard Parker and the Mignonette

Here is another old favorite, a companion repost to yesterday’s repost of “The Unsinkable Hugh Williams – Truth Behind the Legend?” We recently posted in response to a video, “The Strangest Coincidence Ever Recorded?.”  It recounted how three men named Hugh … Continue reading

“Basically, I can kill people” — Joan Druett’s Interview of Alaric Bond

An interview with Alaric Bond by the award winning author, Joan Druett. Reposted with permission from her World of the Written Word blog. Congratulations on the launch of your eighth Age of Nelson novel, The Guinea Boat, an edge-of-the-seat thriller in … Continue reading

Congratulations to Joan Druett — The Beckoning Ice Makes the Long List

Congratulations to Joan Druett! Her crime thriller, The Beckoning Ice, the fifth of her Wiki Coffin series of maritime mysteries, is one of the longlisted titles for the 2014 Ngaio Marsh Award.   We reviewed The Beckoning Ice in December 2012. … Continue reading

Writing Nautical Fiction: Seymour Hamilton Interviews Alaric Bond

Seymour Hamilton recently sat down for a trans-Atlantic interview with Alaric Bond. They discussed Bond’s Fighting Sail series of novels, in particular, and about writing nautical fiction, in general.  It was a fascinating conversation. Seymour Hamilton is the author of the nautical fantasy … Continue reading

Melville’s Moby Dick – Contemporary Reviews and Sales Figures

Yesterday we posted about the Google Doodle honoring Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick on the anniversary of its publication.  The reviews of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick when it was published in 1851 were decidedly mixed. There were indeed positive reviews to balance the … Continue reading

Alaric Bond on C.S. Forester – An Unlikely Sea Daddy

Today is C.S. Forester’s birthday.  (Thanks to Margaret Muir, who pointed it our on Facebook. Otherwise, I would have missed it.) Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, who wrote under the pen name of Cecil Scott “C.S.” Forester was born on August 27, 1899. … Continue reading

eNotated Edition of Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World – A Review

I was recently sent  The eNotated Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum. Enotation is electronic annotation, where instead of footnotes or endnotes, there are embedded links in the text of an e-book. A book like Slocum’s which contains … Continue reading

The Olympias Trireme – 5th Century B.C Warship Reborn

Many historians have long suspected that the performance of the Greek triremes as reported by Esculus and others, were overstated.  Some have referred to them as “mythological.”   The  Olympias trireme, built in 1987,  designed by the naval architect John Coates, who died last week, … Continue reading

From Lord Cochrane to the Wellington Hurricanes – the Evolution the Nautical Hero Part 1. The Founder of our Feast – Thomas Cochrane

Joseph Campbell wrote in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces that all stories follow the ancient patterns of myth and legend. Whether the heroes of nautical fiction quite fit Campbell’s monomyths is open to question but there is no … Continue reading