A seafaring tale for all of us

Shipbuilders, Sea Captains, and Fishermen: The Story of the Schooner Wawona by Joe Follansbee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Joe Follansbee writes that when he began opening the 24 boxes of Wawona archives upon which his book is based, he “felt as Howard Carter must have felt when he opened Tutankhamun’s tomb.” After finishing Follansbee’s Introduction and Acknowledgements, I thought about the task of writing the book itself. Writing a book that people would actually read, based on a miscellaneous collection of artifacts, must have felt a little like walking into the warehouse in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark with notepad in hand. Follansbee’s carefully footnoted research not only produced a terrific read, it preserved a piece of Seattle history that no longer exists. According to Wikipedia, the Wawona was dismantled in 2009, and while parts of her live on at Seattle’s extraordinary Museum of History and Industry, the story of her life, from birth to retirement, only exists thanks to Follansbee’s captivating tale.

Once he’d assembled the basic framework of the story, Follansbee had to flesh it out like a forensic facial reconstruction artist applying thin layers of clay to an ancient skull. If the final product is to serve a purpose, a degree of interpretation and creativity is required. Readers want something more than a skeletal chronology or catalogue, but if the artist strays too far from the underlying facts, the story becomes another one of the myriad “inspired by a true story” pieces that entertain more than they inform. Follansbee strikes the balance perfectly: you feel the waves, smell the salt air and taste the home brew. Both thoroughly entertaining and historically significant, Follansbee’s “Shipbuilders, Sea Captains, and Fishermen: The Story of the Schooner Wawona” is a Pacific Northwest treasure that will resonate wherever the reader resides across our ocean-covered world.




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