Tall Ships and Master Mariners

Elsie de Bruijn was Associate Head, Woodward Biomedical Library, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

From the 1834 logbook of Simon Graham, New Brunswick master mariner:

Monday, October 21: Bending our Small Bower and puting the anchor on the rale with the Intencion of Caling at Rio Jueniro for another Crew and refreshments One Being Dead and Siven un abel to Cum on Deck with Scurvy and all hands more or less infected. (p.25)

Simon had just completed his second passage around Cape Horn. He was 37 and had already spent 20 years at sea.

A century and a half later, his handwritten logs covering more than 80 voyages passed into the authors’ hands. To amateur historians, they proved both fascinating and frustrating. Along with tales of storms, groundings, and even piracy were references that seemed written in a foreign language: “Making a dale of water, Laid To to calk the huddens forward” (p.25); “Brock the main Spencer Gaff and Started of the Starboard Bumkin and Split the Covering Board” (p.37); “The Carpinter finished a new Poup Lather” (p.89).

Understanding Simon’s logs obviously required research. Eventually this led Mssrs. Cunningham and Mabee to look into all aspects of life under sail as Simon would have experienced them. The result is a fact-filled history of nineteenth century seamanship, enlivened by relevant passages from the Graham manuscripts. Each chapter deals with a single topic: shipbuilding and rigging, navigation, shipboard medical care, and the daily life of the crew.

The style is, for the most part, fresh and readable. The authors write for the intelligent lay reader, and the book is an amiable blend of historical fact, anecdote, entries from Simon’s log, and even verse. (When not calking huddens, the skipper tried his hand at poetry.)

Occasionally Cunningham and Mabee get the blend wrong. Here and there the book takes on overtones of a graduate thesis. Technical terms are not always defined, and minor discursions have a way of turning into major diversions. A better use of footnotes might have maintained the balance and pacing of the text.

Overall, however, the book has much to offer both the nonspecialist and the historian. It is a worthy entry in the Breakwater series “Canada’s Atlantic Folklore-Folklife.”