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Voyages: Tales from the Great Age of Sail
Book by Hill, Alfred T.
142 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 18, 2020
A great biography of a godly sea captains in the biggest days of oceanic trading! This book contains a lot of personal diary entries and letters passed down through a family of sea captains.
We get our stuff the same day from Amazon, so it's good to remember what it was like to spend most of your life battling the elements, alone on the face of the deep, to deliver the goods. These men relied on God when they faced trouble. We ought to learn from their example. We aren't any more invincible than we were then. We just have technology to make us arrogant now.
We get our stuff the same day from Amazon, so it's good to remember what it was like to spend most of your life battling the elements, alone on the face of the deep, to deliver the goods. These men relied on God when they faced trouble. We ought to learn from their example. We aren't any more invincible than we were then. We just have technology to make us arrogant now.
May 14, 2021
Quite short book, covering the personal history of Tristram Jordan (1798 - 1856) and his family, focusing on their time at sea in doing trade. There are four men who took to sea, two of whom died at sea (one from disease, the other swept overboard by a wave). The author uses letters and entries from logbooks or journals to tell the tale, along with some pictures (some hand-drawn of the ships), including modern photographs of some of the remains of the ships involved.
The best part is getting a feel for the daily shipboard lives of these men, as well as their difficulties in plying their trade. In addition to constant disease and poor diet, there are quarantines at port, market price fluctuations, spoilage of cargo, dealing with the crew (one crew member pulls a knife on the captain). It's ordinary stuff -- the author notes there's not much in the way of boozing, gambling, or whoring to be found (is that a spoiler?)
And that's the point of reading books like this -- a lot of the memoirs/novels about experience on board that got great acclaim and attention in the 19th century focused on the seamier side. Usually, the "boring" workaday world is ignored. I liked reading about such details as Captain Jordan writing his wife about renewing his insurance coverage on his ship (yes, really). The men on board mainly had reading as their primary entertainment (at least, the men in the book, given to writing letters and journals as well -- it's unsurprising that books would be of interest to them.) However, they don't mention what books they are! Piffle.
Tristram and the other men also demonstrate how seriously they took their Christian faith, with frequent references to approaching the Throne of Grace (from Hebrews 4:16).
The author does a pretty good job of pulling out the most interesting bits of the letters and journal entries, as it's clear there was a lot more of incidental items (especially in the ship logs). However, the organization of the chapters was a bit jarring -- sometimes chronological in order, but the final chapter jumps back in time as well. You need to pay attention as sometimes there are decades between the letters. Thankfully, every entry is identified by when it was written, and there is a convenient timeline in the back of the book for reference.
The best part is getting a feel for the daily shipboard lives of these men, as well as their difficulties in plying their trade. In addition to constant disease and poor diet, there are quarantines at port, market price fluctuations, spoilage of cargo, dealing with the crew (one crew member pulls a knife on the captain). It's ordinary stuff -- the author notes there's not much in the way of boozing, gambling, or whoring to be found (is that a spoiler?)
And that's the point of reading books like this -- a lot of the memoirs/novels about experience on board that got great acclaim and attention in the 19th century focused on the seamier side. Usually, the "boring" workaday world is ignored. I liked reading about such details as Captain Jordan writing his wife about renewing his insurance coverage on his ship (yes, really). The men on board mainly had reading as their primary entertainment (at least, the men in the book, given to writing letters and journals as well -- it's unsurprising that books would be of interest to them.) However, they don't mention what books they are! Piffle.
Tristram and the other men also demonstrate how seriously they took their Christian faith, with frequent references to approaching the Throne of Grace (from Hebrews 4:16).
The author does a pretty good job of pulling out the most interesting bits of the letters and journal entries, as it's clear there was a lot more of incidental items (especially in the ship logs). However, the organization of the chapters was a bit jarring -- sometimes chronological in order, but the final chapter jumps back in time as well. You need to pay attention as sometimes there are decades between the letters. Thankfully, every entry is identified by when it was written, and there is a convenient timeline in the back of the book for reference.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews