In 2007, Eric Jay Dolin wrote Leviathan, The History of Whaling In America, a wonderful book that follows the American whale fisheries from shore whaling, to the fleets of whale ships that sailed in every ocean, to the industry’s decline in the … Continue reading
Category Archives: Seastories
A new book details the history of a hotel built to look like an ocean liner perched high in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Ship Hotel has sailed, but a jaunty new book honors its history and heyday The story of … Continue reading
Pirate Latitudes by Micheal Crichton, published a year after his death, is a romp. It is full of swashbuckling action and completely familiar characters. There is a bold captain, who is either a privateer or a pirate; several fair and … Continue reading
Under Sail is a remarkable account of sixteen year old Felix Riesenberg’s first voyage on a square rigger from South Street Seaport in New York, to Honolulu and back. He sailed on the A.J. Fuller, a Bath built, copper clad, … Continue reading
A review by Steven Toby, written for the Maritime History Listserv, included here with his kind permission. Sounds like a fascinating book. Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White is an excellent book on the last commercial fishing craft … Continue reading
Sam Willis has written what appears to be a fascinating book – Fighting Temeraire. J.M.W. Turner’s painting, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, hangs in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and was recently … Continue reading
My River Chronicle – Rediscovering the America on the Hudson, is a fascinating voyage in the life of a young woman, who finds herself oddly quite at home in a most unlikely new job. It is also a journey through … Continue reading
Live Yankees, the Sewalls and their Ships is a fascinating and sweeping history of one family from Bath, Maine, which built and operated over one hundred merchant ships, mostly square riggers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers … Continue reading
There have been hundreds of novels written about dashing Royal Navy ships’ captains who bear a striking resemblance to Lord Cochrane. The resemblance and family history are most obvious in Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower, but a dozen or so … Continue reading
I started reading nautical fiction, specifically C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series, as a teenager. The Hornblower novels, while meant for adults, were great “boy books,” full of adventure and action, with a hero with just enough self doubt and angst for … Continue reading
Last year the National Maritime Historical Society (NMHS) published a fascinating booklet, John Stobart and the Ships of South Street, which features the pre-eminent maritime artist’s paintings of ships arriving or departing from New York’s South Street docks. At first the presentation struck me as odd. The … Continue reading
Louis Arthur Norton’s book Captains Contentious – The Dysfunctional Sons of the Brine is an entertaining reminder that history is finally about individuals, dedicated to the causes in which they believe, as well as serving their own needs and obsessions. … Continue reading
In his Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian wrote of HMS Surprise, a small British frigate, originally captured from the French. Over several books, the Surprise became almost as beloved a character, in her own way, as Jack Aubrey and Doctor Maturin … Continue reading
In a comment on a prior post, Fiddler’s Green, Redwing mentioned White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, by Herman Melville. I had never read the novel. I am now doing so and enjoying it very much. (It can … Continue reading
A friend pointed this book out to me. It looks intriguing and is coming out in mid-November. Jean Lafite was Jewish? Who knew? (Thanks Henya!) From a review in the Jewish Press: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews … Continue reading
I recently read Joan Druett‘s Shark Island, the second in her Wiki Coffin series of mysteries. A brief review: What makes a mystery work for me is the detective – the knowledgeable outsider, living between two worlds, who can see … Continue reading
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
Jackass Frigate is Napoleonic naval fiction set during the Revolutionary wars. The Jackass Frigate differs from the normal Hornblower/Aubrey sagas in that there is no “hero who becomes an admiral”, rather characters from all divisions of the ship are featured, … Continue reading
Ok, I am about a month behind. The new Matty Graves novel has been out since early September. Then again as this blog has only been up for a few days perhaps I can be forgiven. A review from Publisher’s Weekly: Nautical … Continue reading
Of the some sixty books written by C. Northcote Parkinson, his Richard Delancey series of nautical adventures is still a favorite among many aficionados of Georgian nautical fiction. Of course, Parkinson is best known for his “Parkinson’s Law” – that “work expands … Continue reading