A Book of sea journeys

by Compiled by Ludovic Kennedy

Our imagination and physical being constantly go down to the sea for restoration, challenge, and the recovery of primeval memories. In this new treasury of prose and poetry, Ludovic Kennedy captures, in the words of intrepid voyagers and courageous survivors, the many moods and faces of the vast deep. From Hart Crane to Winston Churchill, from two views of Captain Bligh to Commodore Perry's opening of Japan, man's endurance and the ocean's sway is celebrated. Sea Journeys includes the legendary voyages of exploration and discovery recounted by Salazar and Vaz de Caminha, as well as the later voyages of self-discovery as reflected in the memoirs, stories, and letters of such voyagers as Anna Brassey and Sophia Taylor, Stephen Crane and Somerset Maugham. The terror and savagery of the sea is awesomely portrayed by those who made fantastic voyages in small and open boats. Then there are the magical days of the great steamships and ocean liners, from that Leviathan known as The Great Eastern to the eternally fascinating, doomed Titanic -- and the stories of those who sailed aboard and those who survived.
Some of the finest writing about man's centuries on the sea comes, as a delightful surprise, from unknown seafarers. Keeping them in goodly company are: Sylvia Plath, Noel Coward, Rudyard Kipling, Melville and Dickens, Masefield and Poe, Conrad and Verne, Waugh and Auden, and many, many others singing the endless song of the sea.

Genres: Maritime, History

395 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Colin Freebury · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting and very enjoyable anthology of accounts and stories of men and women and their adventures at sea, from immigrant families making their way to North America: "We were given, as a great privilege, a tiny cabin, about two feet by three by three, and packed in there, the movement of the sea upset our heads and stomachs so horribly that we all turned white as ghosts and began to bring up our very souls..." [Eugenio de Salazar, 1573]; to ‘voyaging in style: "The Cunard has something. It has a name. Half the pleasure of doing a thing really well consists in letting the other people—the people who are not doing the thing at all but would like to if they could—know that one is enjoying the very best to be had."; to individuals in very small boats: "I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve-o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail." [Captain Joshua Slocum].