There is nothing like a good read to sweeten the dark days of winter, and to those who live beside, work on, play on, and are fascinated by the sea, there is especially nothing like a good read with a maritime setting. Several people who have appeared in Working Waterfront stories have shared their favorite maritime books. They range from the obscure to current best sellers, from tales of adventure to contemporary essays, from history to fiction – possibly something for everyone.
A suggestion from Mike Hastings, director of Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, is probably the least familiar: My Mystery Ships, by British Vice-Admiral Gordon Campbell. As a young boy, Hastings found the book, published in 1929, in his father’s library, and it has been a favorite ever since. “It tells about a little-known deception in World War I,” he said, “when destroyers were disguised as merchant ships to lure German submarines to come close to them to investigate. Then, secret doors would open and the supposed civilian ship would blow the sub out of the water.”
Hastings also recommended Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. He read the latter when he was 14 and has enjoyed re-reading it as an adult.
Bob Bayer, director of The Lobster Institute, immediately thought of Boon Island by Kenneth Roberts. “It’s the top of my list,” he said. “It’s a shipwreck story that takes place in the 1700s. The crew is stranded in winter on a Maine island, and in their struggle to survive, turn to cannibalism.” On a more contemporary note, Bayer recommended Jim Acheson’s Lobster Gangs of Maine, because the way of life that Acheson describes is disappearing, especially in southern Maine.
Fisherman Proctor Wells of Phippsburg says his all-time favorite is In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship ESSEX by Nathaniel Philbrick. “I picked it up and read the first couple of lines and couldn’t put it down,” he said. “I’ve loaned it out to all of my relatives and tell everyone, ‘You’ve got to read this.'” Like several other people, Wells also found Linda Greenlaw’s first book, The Hungry Ocean, “pretty intriguing.”
Sue Inches, Director of Industry Development for the Department of Marine Resources, was another who recommended Greenlaw’s book. “I thought her descriptions of what it’s like to go out and hunt fish were wonderful,” she said. “What really sticks in my memory is her strategy, the whole story of all the different factors that went into catching the fish – dealing with the crew, other boats, finding the spot, using the technology.”
Josie Quintrell, Chief Operating Officer at GOMOOS, was so captivated by Northern Nurse by Elliott Merrick. The book relates the experiences of Merrick’s wife, who grew up in Australia and in the 1930s joined the Grenfell Mission as a nurse in Labrador. “The nurses were assisted by medical students from Yale in the summer,” Quintrell explained, (Merrick was one) “but from October to May they were left on their own. The story tells of the difficult decisions she had to make and the procedures she had to perform to care for patients in remote villages.”
Emma Bennett of Freeport, who for 27 years sailed the coast of Maine with her husband, Paul, in their St. Pierre dory (starting at age 60), also loved Northern Nurse, because she and her husband traveled three times on the mail boat along the Labrador coast. “I could visualize the whole area when I read it,” she says. She added that she had just finished Merrick’s Cruising at Last: Sailing the East Coast. The book is a collection of articles Merrick wrote while he and his wife sailed from South Carolina to Maine on three separate voyages in the 20-foot, 4-inch SUNRISE, which he built. He was in his 60s, she in her 70s. “I’ve never seen anyone with so many interesting experiences,” says Bennett, now 98 – “the people they met, going through storms, passing through canals.” She was astonished when Merrick mentioned that they had seen another elderly couple – in a St. Pierre dory – anchored in a small cove near the hospital at Boothbay Harbor.
Joe Payne, BayKeeper for Friends of Casco Bay, has been fascinated by Patrick O’Brien’s novels set on the high seas in the 1800s. FOCB board member Joan Benoit Samuelson urged him to read the first in the series, Master and Commander, little imagining what she was setting into motion. “I took it and it sat next to my bed for awhile,” he said, “but after I started it, I was hooked. I read all 21, and the next year, I read them all again. It’s the most enjoyable reading experience I’ve ever had.” Payne has in turn gotten several FOCB associates interested in the series, which has led to what Associate Director Mary Cerullo characterizes as “some serious Patrick O’Brien groupies” and an 18th century lilt in office conversation.
Cerullo offered suggestions for children. One is her own most recent publication, Life under Ice, which features photographs by Bill Curtsinger of Yarmouth. “The photos are amazing,” she said. “They show the phenomena of gigantism which occurs in cold places. A lot of things grow abnormally large and seem very odd.” Her all-time favorite ocean book is Newberry: The Life and Times of a Maine Clam by Vincent Dethier, a professor of zoology who summered in Blue Hill. “He creates this crotchety clam who sports a purple muffler,” Cerullo explained. “He follows Newberry as he fights with his neighbors and fend off predators, explaining the natural history of the mudflats along the way. It’s a children’s book that adults will enjoy.”
For an exciting account of a little known maritime disaster, Working Waterfront editor David Platt recommended Robert MacNeil’s Burden of Desire, a fictionalized account of the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917. Platt also was fascinated by Sea Room: an Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson. The story concerns two islands in the Hebrides that belonged to the author’s father and were passed on to him. “It’s a wonderful piece of natural history, maritime history and about islands,” said Platt. “It goes back for thousands of years.”
A lover of wooden boats, Platt enjoyed 87 Boat Designs, a Catalog of Small Boat Plans from Mystic Seaport by Benjamin Fuller.
Jean Symonds, who fishes for lobster out of Corea, said Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s collection of essays, Gift from the Sea, remains her favorite because it is so inspirational. She also enjoyed Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. “I learned a lot about the sea and whale hunting from it,” she said, “and what it was like to grow up living in a lighthouse. “And of course, Moby Dick itself is another. I know of a book group in Winter Harbor that is reading it.”
Jeff Holden, owner of Portland Shellfish and Claw Island Foods of Vinalhaven, said he felt the Island Institute’s recent publication, Lobsters Great and Small “was very well done.” He also recommended Fred Boynton, Lobster Fisherman, which tells about the life of a lobsterman from New Harbor. It may be difficult to locate, as only a few hundred copies were in circulation. Holden admired Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and, like several other people, Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. But a book that changed his perception of things was Supertanker! The Story of the World’s Biggest Ships by George Sullivan, which came out in 1978. “I read it a long time ago,” he said, “and really it was a total eye-opener to learn what was going on then with supertankers around the world – how those things would just break in half with one wave in the days before they went to double-hull ships.”
Dana Morse, Extension Associate with Maine Sea Grant Program and UMaine Cooperative Extension, was fascinated by Mark Kurlansky’s Cod. “I liked the mixture of history, both natural and human, and how it was blended,” he said. “It was an entertaining way to articulate the importance of the fish and how it has fit into our economy and culture.”
Morse is looking forward to reading Founding Fish, by John McPhee, which Sam Chapman, who runs the Waldoboro Shad Hatchery with his wife and son, says tells “everything you wanted to know and never knew existed about shad.” McPhee looks into people who are involved in various aspects of shad, Chapman said, “from scientists to weir fishermen in the Bay of Fundy. He even tells how shad was at one time a major source of protein and played a part in Washington’s winter at Valley Forge. It’s an enlightening book.”
Chapman also recalled his childhood fascination with Captain’s Courageous by Rudyard Kipling – “its information about the fishing industry and how it was run” – and Gray Seas Under, by Farley Mowat, which relates the life of an iron-bodied ship built in Newfoundland.
Carl Wilson, lobster scientist at the Department of Marine Resources, allowed that Mowat’s The Boat that Wouldn’t Float “brings tears to my eyes (of laughter) every time I read it. I’ve gone through so many of the same calamities,” he said. He also enjoyed Something in the Water, by Peter Scott, a fictionalized account of fishermen who patrolled Maine’s coast during World War II.
Popham resident Leila Percy, Maine State Legislature Representative for District 51, recalled American Captain by Edison Marshall. “It’s a wonderful book about the days of the schooners,” she said. She found the opening scene particularly riveting, when a young man who is on the beach at Popham waiting for his parents to return from a voyage, watches as their boat is wrecked at the mouth of the Kennebec.
Chris Davis, a teacher at University of Maine at Orono and co-owner of Pemaquid Oyster, is intrigued by books about Arctic and Antarctic exploration. He recommended Sir Ernest Shackleton’s South, and books about Shackleton’s voyage by Carolyn Alexander and Alfred Lansing. “They are all amazing,” said Davis, who traveled to New York City to see the Shackleton exhibit that contained many of the photos in Alexander’s book.
What Davis describes as “an adventure-at-sea kick” (in contrast to more serious works like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson), extended to books about Captain Robert Scott’s explorations and Adrift, written by Steve Callahan of Lamoine. Callahan, he explained, was sailing alone across the Atlantic about 14 years ago when he was hit by a large vessel and his boat immediately sank. He was adrift for 76 days. “I don’t know how anyone could survive what he did,” Davis said.
And this reader? One of my all-time favorites is No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod (review, page 25), a moving, beautifully written account of a family that leaves Scotland in 1779 to settle in Cape Breton. MacLean shows how two hundred years later, the family retains its links to the past and each other through desperate circumstances. He vividly describes their independence and fortitude, and a way of life much akin to life in Maine’s small fishing communities.