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Charles Nordhoff

Like many a restless teenager before him, Charles Nordhoff craved excitement and in 1844, when barely 14, he managed to talk his way into the US Navy. A bookish lad who had been apprenticed to a printer, Nordhoff was better educated than most of his fellow seamen, and was well equipped to describe what became a three-year round-the-world adventure. He was lucky in his ship, USS Columbus, a large 74-gun ship of the line that had been chosen to undertake a diplomatic mission to China, and then to Japan, in an abortive attempt to open the latter to American trade. In the course of this voyage, Nordhoff was to see many countries of south-east Asia and the Far East, before crossing the Pacific, visiting South America, rounding Cape Horn, and finally returning to Norfolk, Virginia, having crossed the Equator six times. Apart from its descriptions of exotic climes, much of the interest in the book lies in a boys view of naval life and how the ship was run. The US Navy was small and followed very conservative principles, with an emphasis on discipline, routine and training that would have been familiar a century earlier. However, it was also subtly different: more humane in its treatment of the crew, less draconian in punishment, and a promoter of what would be considered Victorian moral values. The book offers a valuable and entertaining account of life in the last days of the sailing warship.

Seaforth Publishing

Seafarers' Voices

Man-of-War Life

William Morris Barnes

Barnes was born in 1850 into a shipowning family in St Johns, Newfoundland, and first went to sea while still a schoolboy. His career seemed predestined, and by the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a Liverpool company, serving in their sailing ships working a triangular passage to St Johns, the Brazils and back to Liverpool. He tried to swallow the anchor when he married but running a grocery store was too mundane, and he soon went back to sea, transferring his skills to the now dominant steamships. Even though he was 64, on the outbreak of the First World War he promptly volunteered for service. He does not seem to have regretted it, even after being mined or torpedoed three times; the last time he was badly injured and spent three days adrift in an open boat. Despite these disasters, like many a sailor, he was probably safer at sea while in one port he fell for a rather exotic woman, only to discover she was a German spy. When he eventually retired, to New York, he got to know a couple called Hilda and Denys Wortman. Denys was a newspaper cartoonist, who was rather taken with the gruff old sea-dog and based a character he dubbed Mopy Dick on him for a series of popular cartoons. Meanwhile, Hilda encouraged Barnes to record his adventures and she eventually became the editor of the first edition of this book, imbuing the story with far more narrative flair than usually found in unliterary memoirs.

Rolling Home

Frederick Chamier

Chamier was a Royal Navy officer, who like his exact contemporary Captain Marryat is best remembered for a series of naval novels. The Life of a Sailor was his first publication and is usually catalogued as fiction, which may be a tribute to Chamiers story-telling skills but it is wrong the book is an exact account of his naval career, with every personality, ship and event he describes corroborated by his service records. By the time he went to sea in 1809, the heroic age of Nelson was over, but the war was far from won, and he was to see a lot of action, from anti-slavery patrols off Africa to punitive raids on the American coast during the War of 1812.His descriptions of the latter were to prove highly controversial. Like many liberal officers, he deplored the strategy of bringing the war to the civilian population, and the book was much criticised by more senior naval officers for saying so. Chamier represents a new generation of post-Nelsonic naval officer, more gentlemanly, better educated and perhaps more open-minded he certainly got on well with Lord Byron, whom he met in Constantinople and his sympathies generally look forward to the Victorian age. He was too young to rise to high rank, and after the Napoleonic War, like many others, he was condemned to a life on half-pay and perhaps forced into a literary career, but out of it came one of the eras most authentic accounts of a junior officers naval service.

Life of a Sailor

Nelson Cole

This is the narrative of a harpooner in the whale-ship Charles W Morgan, whose four-year voyage in 1849–1853 took him from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to the South Pacific and on around the world. Before the days of the whale-gun and its explosive warhead, whaling was a dangerous and far from one-sided pursuit indeed, one of Haleys earliest experiences was the destruction of his boat by a whale attack, and even when the harpoon hit the target, the whaleboat would be towed at speed until the wounded whale was exhausted, a terrifying experience that was known to whalemen as a Nantucket sleigh ride. Haley's narrative covers all the excitements and dangers of the business like trying to work on a slippery whale carcass, while the surrounding waters seethed with sharks but also encompasses the long hours of boredom, when sailors entertained each other with tall tales. Many are recounted, and, surprisingly, some of the least likely can be corroborated. In fact, Haley's anecdotes of the South Seas in transition from one of the great appeals of the book. On the one hand, there were still hostile islands with murderous inhabitants, while others had been so strongly influenced by Christian missionaries that pleasures of the flesh were now entirely off-limits. Whaling was, in effect, the first oil industry, a high-risk business where huge fortunes were to be made. Haleys is the authentic voice of those that chose its dangers.

Whale Hunter

John Newton

John Newton is now best remembered as an Anglican clergyman and the author of the hymn Amazing Grace. For the first thirty years of his life, however, he was engrossed in the slave trade. His father planned for him to take up a position as slave master on a West Indies plantation but he was instead pressed into the Royal Navy where, after attempting to desert, he was captured and flogged round the fleet. After this humiliation he was placed in service on a slave ship bound for Sierra Leone, but there, having upset his captain and crew, he found himself the servant of the merchants wife, an African Duchess called Princess Peye, who abused him along with her slaves. As he wrote himself, he was an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves of West Africa.In 1748 he was rescued and returned home and it was on this voyage that he experienced his spiritual conversion. Though avoiding profanity, women, gambling and drinking he continued in the slave trade, taking up a position on a ship bound for the West Indies and then making three further voyages as a captain of slave ships. In 1755, after suffering a severe stroke, he turned away from seafaring and pursued a path to the priesthood, becoming the curate at Olney in 1764.His Authentic Narrative, as it was called, is a remarkable, no-holds-barred account of the African slave trade, as well as an account of his struggle between religion and the flesh.

Slaver Captain

Robert Hay

A Royal Navy sailor recounts his adventuresome life at sea in this colorful memoir offering a rare look at early nineteenth century naval life.

 In 1803, at the age of fourteen, Robert Hay ran away from home to join the Royal Navy. For the next eight years, he experienced the trials and tribulations of a sailor’s life. Intelligent and capable, he served a series of officers, all of whom helped advance his education. Yet he found the taxing conditions of life onboard detestable. He was even tempted to desert his post after an action off the French coast.

 Hay was posted to the East Indies for five eventful years, and was badly wounded before returning home. His next ship ran aground off Plymouth and, this time, he took the opportunity to desert—but was then quickly taken by a press gang. Terrified of being identified, he managed to escape to Scotland and home.

 Told with humor and verve, Hay’s memoir offers an impressive description of early nineteenth-century naval life. Colorful stories of drink and debauchery come side by side with keep observations on nature and humanity.

Landsman Hay

George Shelvocke

In 1719, Captain George Shelvocke, a poverty-stricken ex-naval officer, appealed for help to an old shipmate, Edward Hughes, who was then part of a consortium fitting-out two privateering vessels to prey on the Spanish in the Pacific. He offered Shelvocke the captaincy of the larger ship but then demoted him to a smaller vessel, and Shelvocke, bitter and revengeful, immediately set off on his own for South America with a semi-mutinous crew, and his much-hated Captain of Marines, William Betagh. After rounding Cape Horn, one of Shelvockes men shot a black albatross an event later to be immortalised in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and then, off Chile, with considerable loot onboard his ship, the Speedwell, was wrecked in the Juan Fernandez Islands. Undaunted, he built another vessel and eventually returned to England, via Macao, loaded with Spanish plunder. Back home he was arrested for piracy and defrauding his shareholders, though he argued that he owed the original owners nothing as their ship had been honestly lost. The events were grippingly portrayed in his memoir A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea, though some of it was disputed by Betagh and others, and it still reads today as a fast moving, incident-packed tale exposing the world of the maritime mercenaries and privateers, men who would take on anything and everything for Gold!

A Privateer's Voyage Round the World

Jean Marteilhe

This remarkable memoir tells of the miseries of Jean Marteilhe of Bergerac, a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion, who, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, attempted, like so many French Huguenots, to escape to the more sympathetic Protestant countries bordering France. In 1700, heading through the Ardennes towards Charleroi, he was captured by French Dragoons and thrown into gaol. In 1707 he then found himself, like so many Huguenots, condemned to serve in the French Mediterranean galleys. Little is known of life as a galley slave on these oared vessels. Certainly no accounts have come down to us from ancient Greece or Rome, though a little is known from the time of the Crusades. So Marteilhes racy account represents the only authentic record of the miseries of a galley slave who experienced all the horrors of whips and chains and the dreaded bastinado—foot whipping. For six years he pulled his oar, often seeing friends and co-religionists lashed—sometimes to death—under the whips of the overseers. He himself sustained almost fatal injuries in a bloody engagement with the British off the mouth of the Thames before being released under a general amnesty in 1713. Galley Slave brings vividly to life the sufferings and conditions on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century galleys and is a unique and unforgettable account.

Seafarers' Voices - The book series

Seafarers' Voices - The book series

Seafarers' Voices books in order

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