An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Accounts

 

Balano, James W (Ed.). The Log of the Skipper’s Wife. Camden, Me: Down East Book, 1979. Excerpts from the journals of Dorothea Moulton Balano (the editor’s mother), who took to the sea with her husband on a variety of sailing ships in the early twentieth century. The vivid and witty entries chronicle her many experiences at sea.

Barlow, Edward. Barlow’s Journal of his Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East and West Indiamen and other merchantmen from 1659 to 1703 (Basil Lubbock, ed.), in two volumes. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1934. These two volumes should be required reading for anyone researching English maritime trade, naval history, and seafaring in the second half of the 17th century. Barlow went everywhere (Africa, Asia, the Americas and West Indies) and saw everything, but had a rough time of it.

Barnard, John. Ashton’s Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances, of Mr. Philip Ashton. Boston: Samuel Gerrish, 1725 (reprinted by Peabody Museum of Salem, 1976). Ashton is taken captive by evil pirate captain Edward Low and is subsequently marooned for 16 months. Another early eighteenth century hard-luck case.

Brewster, Mary. “She Was a Sister Sailor”: Mary Brewster’s Whaling Journals 1845-1851. Edited by Joan Druett. Mystic, Ct.: Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc., 1992. These represent six years of daily journal entries describing daily life at sea. Brewster, the wife of an American whaling ship captain, accompanied her husband on lengthy voyages to the Pacific. These journals are described by their editor, the noted maritime historian Joan Druett, as “the most complete compendium of the female experience in nineteenth century whaling and seafaring.”

Canot, Theodore. Adventures of an African Slaver. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, Inc., 1928. Narrative of a slave-ship sailor.

Chamier, Frederick. Life of a Sailor. Barnsley, U.K.: Seaforth Publishing, 2011. Seafarers’ Voices Series. Chamier goes to sea as a naïve, puffed-up young Royal Navy midshipman in 1809 and quickly learns of the hardships of naval life (even as an officer). Continues in the service until 1827. Meets Lord Byron in Constantinople. Great verbal imagery here, such as cold sailors “wrinkling up their noses, like monkeys in a frost.”

Chase, Owen, Thomas Chappel, and George Pollard. Narratives of the Wreck of the Whale-ship Essex of Nantucket Which was Destroyed by a Whale in the Pacific Ocean in the Year 1819. London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1935 (re-published by Dover Books, New York, 1989). The true story of a whale attack that inspired Melville’s Moby Dick and, in 2015, the lamentable movie In the Heart of the Sea. Involves cannibalism and great suffering.

Cleveland, Richard Jeffry. Voyages and Commercial Enterprises of the Sons of New England. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968 (originally published in 1857). Autobiography of a New England merchant ship sailor, 1792-1833.

Cloud, Enoch. Enoch’s Voyage: Life on a Whaling Ship, 1851-1854. Wakefield, R.I. and London: Moyer Bell, 1994. This is the real deal. After a short introduction by Cloud’s great, great, great granddaughter Elizabeth McLean, this book is the transcribed day-to-day account of Cloud’s three-year stint at sea during the height of the American whaling era. Beware: Cloud is hopelessly addicted to exclamations!!!

Cobb, Elisha. Elisha Cobb, 1768-1848: A Cape Cod Skipper. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. Memoirs of a New England sea captain, describing voyages to Europe in the 1790s. Coggeshall, George. Thirty-six Voyages to Various Parts of the World Made Between the Years 1799 and 1841. London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1874 (first published in New York in 1858). Detailed memoir of seagoing life by a famous New England sea captain and privateer.

Cooper, James Fennimore. Ned Myers, or a Life Before the Mast. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989. This one is rightfully considered a classic among sailor memoirs. It presents the life of Edward Myers, narrated to his old friend Cooper (the famous author). Myers sailed in nearly every type of merchant vessel and warship during the first half of the 19th century. Between the booze and the shipwrecks, he had a hard life. Meyers’ eyewitness account of the sinking of the schooner Scourge on Lake Ontario in 1813 was hugely helpful to archaeologists after the discovery of the wreck in the 1970s.

Coxere, Edward. The Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere (E.H.W. Meyerstein, ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945. Memoirs of 17th century English sailor in European and Mediterranean waters. Another hard-luck case: numerous disastrous voyages and frequent persecution at home for his then-radical Quaker beliefs.

Crow, Hugh. The Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow: The Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain. Introduction by John Pinfold. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007. Crow made thirteen slaving voyages across the Atlantic in the years immediately prior to the outlawing of the slave trade by the British Government in 1807. Besides recounting his adventures as a mariner, the book serves as an apologia for his participation in the trade: in Crow’s view the slaves were better off in the plantations of the Americas than back home in Africa. Apparently, he was doing them a huge favor.

Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World. London: Argonaut Press, 1927 (there are other editions as well). Dampier was a curious character: Buccaneer, naval officer, geologist and biologist, explorer. This book is his most famous, describing his circumnavigation of the world between 1679 and 1691.

Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1937 (this has been published in many editions). Considered one of the classics of sea literature. Narrative of a college student who enlists as a common sailor for a two-year voyage to California and back, 1834-1836.

Dickenson, Jonathan. Jonathan Dickenson’s Journal or, Gods Protecting Providence, Being the narrative of a Journey from Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 and April 1, 1697. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1945. Account of English merchant shipwrecked on the coast of Florida.

Doane, Benjamin. Following the Sea: A Young Sailor’s Account of the Seafaring Life in the mid1800s. Halifax, N.S.: Nimbus Publishing, Ltd. and the Nova Scotia Museum, 1987. Narrative of the seafaring and whaling experiences of Doane, recorded by his son and published by his grandson. While highly readable, the memoir was written many years after the events it describes, and the reader must judge for himself or herself if the story contains ‘improvements’.

Durand, James, James Durand, An Able Seaman of 1812 (George S. Brooks, ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. Memoirs of Connecticut sailor who served on merchant craft and in the American and Royal Navies between 1801 and 1816.

Ely, Edward. The Wanderings of Edward Ely (Anthony and Allison Sirna, eds.). New York: Hastings House, 1954. Account of passenger on voyage from New York to California gold fields in 1850-1851.

Figueroa, Martín Fernández de. A Spaniard in the Portuguese Indies, James B. McKenna, ed. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Figueroa joined Portuguese East Indies fleet in 1505 and spent six years voyaging around Far East.

Gardner, James Anthony. Above and Below Hatches: Recollections of James Anthony Gardner. London: Chatham Publishing, 2000. Hijinks-and-opinion-heavy memoirs of life in the Royal Navy during the late 18th and early 19th century. Like Hervey’s journals (see below), this account was not intended for publication, with its tales of wild antics and strange times.

Garneray, Louis. Seaman Garneray: Voyages, Aventures et Combats. Roland Wilson, trans. Argyll, Scotland: Argyll Publishing, 2003. Account of a French sailor during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Garneray served on both Republican Navy vessels and privateers, and after his capture spent a long stretch on a British prison hulk at Portsmouth.

Goelet, Francis. The Voyages and Travels of Francis Goelet, 1746-1758. New York: Queens College Press and the Gregg Press, 1970. Daily journals of a New York City merchant, describing five voyages to New England, England, Holland, and the West Indies in the mid-18th century. Includes tipped-in section of Goelet’s pen-and-watercolor ship portraits and charts.

Greene, Welcome A. The Journals of Welcome Arnold Greene (Howard Greene and Alice E. Smith, eds.). Madison, WI.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1956. Detailed daily journal of two voyages, kept by the supercargo of the merchant brigantine Perseverance, 1817-1820.

Hatch, A.S. Jack Corbett MARINER. New York: The Quantuck Lane Press, 2003. Narrative of Alfredrick Hatch, sent to sea as a sickly lad to either “cure him or kill him.” A classic tale of the young greenhorn tossed into forecastle among the hard-boiled old salts. Jack Corbett befriends Hatch, “shows him the ropes,” and gets him through the voyage. Years later, Corbett shows up on the doorstep of the now-wealthy Hatch, who hires him as a family retainer (at this point the Victorian literary sap starts dripping out of the text, you may well end up in tears).

Hay, Kenneth M. and Joy Roberts, eds. The Sea Voyages of Edward Beck in the 1820s. Edinburgh: The Pentland Press, 1996. Detailed journals of an observant sailor, beginning with his apprenticeship and continuing up to his elevation to ship’s officer. Beck sails in European waters, and subsequently makes voyages to Quebec and around the cape to Calcutta.

Hay, Robert. Landsman Hay. Barnsley, U.K.: Seaforth Publishing, 2010. Seafarers’ Voices Series. Narrative of Hay, who joins the Royal Navy in 1803 at age 14 and spends the next eight years regretting it. Nearly loses a leg, is press-ganged after deserting, and is shipwrecked: he had his reasons for wanting to leave.

Hay, Mary. I Saw a Ship A’Sailing. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1981. These are Hay’s reminiscences of the eight years she spent on her father’s ship Ladye Doris, when she was between the ages of seven and fifteen. Written in a narrative form from memory, so the account is less ‘immediate’ than a seafaring journal, but an entertaining read in its own right.

Hervey, Augustus. August Hervey’s Journal: The Adventures Afloat and Ashore of a Naval Casanova. David Erskine, ed. London: Chatham Publishing, 2002. These are the very personal journals of a Royal Navy officer who rose high in rank in the mid-18th century, but who also recorded details of his remarkably active sex life. A curious look at the naval upper crust.

Johnson, Noah (‘A Wanderer’). Journals of Two Cruises Aboard the American Privateer Yankee. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967. Daily journals of ship’s clerk of an American privateer, 1812-1813.

Kelly, Samuel. Samuel Kelly An Eighteenth Century Seaman. Crosby Garstin, ed. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1925. Account of Kelly’s seafaring life between 1778 and 1795, with voyages between Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. A terrific read.

Killman, Daniel O. Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail & Steam. Edited by John Lyman and Harold D. Huycke. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. This is a new favorite of mine, the unvarnished account of a hard-boiled and relentless American sailor who commanded ships in the Pacific for most of his career, and experienced every kind of difficulty and triumph in his more than fifty years at sea. This book has joined the F.H. Shaw book (see below) as a reading for my Anth 610 course.

Lay, William and Cyrus M. Hussey. Mutiny on Board the Whaleship Globe. New York: Corinth Books, 1963. Survivor accounts of the bizarre and bloody Globe mutiny of 1824.

Léry, Jean de. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1990. Account of the ill-fated French Huguenot attempt to colonize Brazil; his account of the voyage home to France in 1556 is a classic among sea voyages gone bad: gushing leaks, a gunpowder explosion, near-capsizing, and slow starvation (sadly, none of the pet parrots and monkeys made it home, and most of the leather clothing items also got eaten).

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van. Discours of Voyages into ye East & West Indies. First English edition London, 1598; Amsterdam and Norwood, N.J.: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd. and Walter J. Johnson, Inc., 1974. Linschoten was the Dutch skunk at the Portuguese tea party: He traveled throughout the East Indies as a Portuguese employee, then came home and wrote a book that was essentially a road map for Dutch and English interlopers in the Far East. Some material on Portuguese seafaring in the late 16th century, although Linschoten is more of a cultural geographer.

Little, George. Life on the Ocean; or, Twenty Years at Sea. New York: Richard Marsh, 1854. Memoirs of a merchant sailor and privateersman between 1807 and 1826.

Loomis, Hezekiah. Journal of Hezekiah Loomis. Louis F. Middlebrook, ed. Salem, Mass.: The Essex Institute, 1928. Daily journal of Loomis, a steward aboard the U.S. Navy brig Vixen in 1804.

Marteilhe, Jean. Galley Slave. Vincent McInerney, ed. Barnsley, Great Britain: Seaforth Publishing, 2010. The title kind of says it all. A rare survivor’s account by Marteilhe, a French Huguenot imprisoned for his beliefs and sent to the galleys in 1707. After six years at the oars he was released in an amnesty in 1713 and went on to write this account.

Mitchell, Arthur Blackwell. The Voyages of Arthur Blackwell Mitchell. Priscila Bagg Donham and David Van Voorhis Wood, eds. Alna, Me.: Forfarshire Books, 2016. This is a memoir dictated by Mitchell three decades after the end of his career as a sailor. The book is a lively account of four years of voyaging, sometimes in the Atlantic but mostly in the Pacific, on the Glasgow-owned barque Forfarshire. A terrific insider’s description of seafaring at the end of the age of sail, and of the hardworking but reckless lives of the barque’s crewmembers. Mitchell was a man of his era (i.e. expect cringe-inducing references to the nonwhite peoples that he encountered).

Mitchell, Josiah A., Henry Ferguson, and Samuel Ferguson. Longboat to Hawaii: An Account of the Voyage of the Clipper Ship Hornet of New York Bound for San Francisco in 1866. Cambridge, Md.: Cornell Maritime Press, Inc., 1974. Tale of the burning of the Hornet off the Galapagos and the subsequent voyage by longboat to a landing in Hawaii.

Morrell, Abby Jane. Captain’s Wife: Narrative of a Voyage in the Schooner Antarctic, 1829, 1830, 1831. Barnsley, U.K.: Seaforth Publishing, 2012. Account by the insightful Morrell of her life and times on an American whaling ship, commanded by her husband, during a voyage to the Pacific Ocean between 1829 and 1831.

Nagle, Jacob. The Nagle Journal. John C. Dann, ed. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988. Terrific autobiography of Pennsylvanian who sailed in American privateers during the Revolutionary War, in the Royal Navy under Nelson, aboard East India Company ships, and in numerous merchant craft, all between 1775 and 1841.

Newton, John. Slaver Captain. Barnsley, U.K.: Seaforth Publishing, 2010. Newton went to sea as a young man and experienced hard times in the Royal Navy and as a junior crewman on a slaving voyage. He experienced a spiritual conversion in 1748 (i.e. found Jesus), but continued on in the slaving service for many years and only later in life recognized the cognitive disconnect in being a devout Christian who transported slaves for a living. He became a late-in- life convert to abolitionism. Fun fact: Newton is best known as the writer of the song Amazing Grace.

Nicol, John. The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936 (reprinted by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1997). Memoirs of British seaman, 1776-1822. Whew, this one is also a good read. Lots of great anecdotes and seafaring perils here.

Olmsted, Francis Allyn. Incidents of a Whaling Voyage. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1841 (reprinted by Bell Publishing Co., New York, 1969). Description of a whaling voyage, 1839-1841.

Olmsted, Gideon. The Journal of Gideon Olmsted (Gerard W. Gawalt, ed.). Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1978. Facsimile of American privateersman’s journal, 1777.

Phillips, Carla Rahn, ed. Life at Sea in the Sixteenth Century: The Landlubber’s Lament of Eugenio de Salazar. James Ford Bell Lectures Number 24, University of Minnesota, 1987. Amusing account of the horrors of life at sea by a Spanish civil servant traveling from the old country to Hispaniola in 1573: “Lice, so large that some of them get seasick and vomit pieces of flesh from apprentice seamen.”

Robinson, William. Jack Nastyface. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1983. Memoirs of a British seaman concerning his impressment and service in the Royal Navy in the early 19th century. Considered a classic among sailor autobiographies.

Rogers, Woodes. A Cruising Voyage Around the World. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1970. Here’s another one of the classics. Account of three-year voyage around world beginning in 1708 by an English privateer. Along the way Rogers rescues the marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk (the real-life ‘Robinson Crusoe’) on the island of Juan Fernandez.

Samuels, Samuel. From Forecastle to Cabin. Seaforth Publishing, 2012. The memoirs of Samuels, who ran off to sea in the 1830s at age 11. He experiences all the usual dangers, privations, and hard usage of a common sailor, plus some unusual adventures (he and a companion claim to have rescued a woman from a harem in Constantinople). Samuels rose in his profession to become the master of several vessels, including the famous trans-Atlantic packet Dreadnought.

Savigny, J. B. Henri and Alexander Correard. Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal. Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1986 [a reprint of the London edition of 1818]). The ho-hum title does not prepare the reader for the horrible story contained within. These are two eyewitness accounts, one of them by a naval surgeon (Savigny), of the 1816 wrecking of the French frigate Medusa on the western coast of Africa. One of the epic stories of death and (for a few) survival at sea, commemorated by the famous Théodore Géricault painting that now hangs in the Louvre.

Shaw, Frank Hubert. White Sails and Spindrift. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1947. One of my favorites, written by Shaw in the 1940s as a lively memoir of about his training as a sailor just as the big sailing ships passed from the scene. This one is a gold mine of incidents (those of you who have taken ANTH 610 will remember this as a required reading book).

Sokolow, Michael. Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. “What a miserable life a sea fareing life is” Benson wrote in 1862. A remarkably detailed and intimate journal of a free black American sailor in the middle decades of the 19th century. The book includes much interpretive text by Sokolow. Spavens, William. The Narrative of William Spavens, a Chatham Pensioner by Himself. Introduction by N.A.M. Rodger. London: Chatham Publishing, 1998. Account of Spavens’ seafaring career in the second half of the 18th century.

Teller, Walter, ed. Five Sea Captains: Their Own Accounts of Voyages Under Sail. New York: Athenaeum Publishers, 1960. Just as the title says: five narratives of 19th century mariners.

Tyng, Charles. Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833. New York: Viking Penguin Group, 1999. A narrative of early 19th-century American pluck and industry: Tyng begins his career as a cabin boy on a voyage to China in 1808 and rises in the seafaring profession to be a captain and owner of two ships. There’s wonderful stuff here: a description of the tattoos acquired as a sailor youth (and regretted as an adult); Tyng’s purchase of a whole, mummified mermaid from Japan for $500; and the memorable dead-goat-putrefying-in-a-vat-of-molasses incident (molasses which was subsequently sold to unsuspecting buyers).

Uring, Nathaniel. The Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring. London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1928 (First published 1726). Autobiography of Uring, from his first passage as a young lad on a collier in 1697 to his retirement from seafaring in 1721; accounts of merchant voyages to North American colonies, slaving in Africa, cutting logwood in Honduras, smuggling slaves to New Spain, commanding a West Indies Packet from England, trading in Mediterranean ports, trade in wine and brandy from Azores and Madeira to Lisbon and North America. Uring survived numerous shipwrecks and near-shipwrecks, frequent chases and occasional captures by French privateers and Barbary pirates. This guy saw it all.

Wetherell, John. The Adventures of John Wetherel. C.S. Forester, ed. London: Michael Joseph, 1954. A well-written, entertaining, and insightful account of a British sailor impressed into the Royal Navy in 1803. Wetherell has much to say on the subject of impressment and tyrannical treatment of sailors by naval officers. His ship Hussar wrecked on the coast of France in 1804 and Wetherell and his mates were confined in French prisons for the next ten years.

Williams, Frederick. The Voyages of Frederick Williams. Eleanor P. Cross, ed. Chesapeake, Virginia: Norfolk County Historical Society, 1972. Autobiography by Williams, of his seafaring life from 1818 to1839. German-born merchant ship captain who sailed out of Norfolk, Virginia for most of his career. He was an eyewitness to the first transatlantic crossing by a steamboat, the American Savannah. There are also accounts of taking freed slaves back to Africa, various storms, and the general routine of early 19th century seafaring life.

Wright, Louis B. A Voyage to Virginia in 1609. Charlottesville, Va.: The University of Virginia Press, 1973. Two accounts of the loss of the English Galleon Sea Venture on Bermuda en route to Jamestown, Va.