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11. colorful portrait of a_ v~pishing way of hfe. -Publishers Week()!
Chase shark off Sri Lanka in a handsewn OTUWa. Ferry timber down the Chilean coast in a lancha Chiloia . Sail through harbors crowded with modern vessels in a Chinese junk whose design has been unchanged for nearly 5,000 years. These are some of the experiences you'll share in The Las1 Sailors. Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes circled the globe in search of the men who still set out under sail to make their living. In Asia, in Africa, in South America, they spent several weeks in each of their selected ports, getting to know the sailors and the local seas, helping to crew the boats, and vividly recording a way of life whose days are clearly numbered, but whose fascination remains boundless. Oversize format, more than 100 Rhotogr~1=1hs, including 16 p._gges in full color,_$19.95 At bookstores now, or use the coupon to order by mail.
THE LAST SAIIDRS I HI I N/11 I l/IYS 01 WOl\KING SAIL NEIL HOLLANDER AND HARALD MERTES WITH A FOREWORD BY ORSON WELLES
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Greyhounds of the Sea; The Story of the American Clipper Ship; Third Edition with 500 Sailing Records, by Carl C. Cutler (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1984, 688pp, biblio, index , illus, $32.95) . Carl Cutler's masterpiece on the American clippers, their captains , crews and never-to-be-forgotten achievements under sail was first published in 1930, over half a century ago. But Cutler's engaging prose reads as fresh today as it did when as a child I spent hours over this book , caught up in the excitement of a time when the newspapers in New York reviewed each new clipper ship to come down the ways like a new play or a novel . Cutler makes us share that excitement and with unique authority he plumbs the reasons for it in this classic work on the heroic age of American sail. Cutler was fifty when he started this work. Born into the age of sail himself, he had been to sea as a youth in the bark Alice, and after a successful career as lawyer he settled into his wife's hometown of Mystic, determined to do justice the inspiring heritage of the American sailing ship, and particularly the American clipper ships, recognized in their heyday, the 1840s and 50s, as the most beautiful and sea-conquering ships ever built. He buried himself in journals and old newspapers, and consulted some 5,000 ship's logs in his admirable determination to get back to the factual record left by these ships and their people. Cutler himself was a man of heroic mold . He was one of the founders of Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and the person who led that institution to save the whaleship Cha.rles W Morgan-evidence of his belief in the importance of the real thing. And that hunger for the real thing is rewarding to the reader of his work. In these pages he traces the whole sweep of American seafaring under sail, searching out the roots of the American achievement, beginning with the colonists who sailed forth from their " rocky, poverty-compelling" coasts to forge the beginnings of what became a worldwide seaborne commerce. And you'll hear these seafaring pioneers speak in the true idiom of their day. You'll come to know the canny builders who conceived and built ships able to outpace fast British cruisers , and the resolute skippers and men who sailed and , when necessary, fought these ships. And you'll learn of these things not in bland , textbook prose but iit'the authentic voice of a person who, as we would say today, had "been there':.._who had been to sea in sail under the American flag himself, and had known the survivors the clipper era, the builders and masters of ships who
still stamped the quarterdeck in Cutler's youth. H e knew these men , the veterans of a David Crockett or Young America, the clippers that came from the East Boston yard of Donald McKay or the New York East River yard of William H. Webb. With care and with authority, Cutler examines the voyages, the hulls that made the voyages, and the people who wrote the most brilliant chapter in the five thousand year story of the sailing ship. In Greyhounds, the clipper ship finds the historian equal to her heritage-a heritage that will live while people still care for the great deeds that shaped American history and the American character, or for anyone who, like Solomon three thousand years ago, wonders at the way of a ship in the sea . P ETER STANFORD
A Life in Boats-The Years Before The War, by Waldo Howland , foreword by Revell Carr (Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic CT, 1984, 307pp, index , 105 photos & drawings, $32 .50) . Waldo Howland is the only one who could have written such a supremely readable, completely authentic, and sympathetic account about the American yachting scene in the 1920s and 30s. He knew virtually all the giants of the era, the boat owners, the designers, the builders, as well as many of those who helped to make the period the last great flowering of what we today think of as traditional American yachting before it was blasted out of existence by World War II, inflation, and fiberglass. Waldo Howland grew up in boats on Buzzards Bay in the 1920s. He raced and sailed with some of the legendary figures of the era and on some of the legendary yachts. He raced to Bermuda many times-twice on Bill Hand's Flying Cloud III, on the Transatlantic and Fastnet races in Landfall and Highland Light, and he made a somewhat hairy winter passage to Bermuda on Nina. He raced in everything from Herreshoff and Alden 12 \lzs to the great graceful and able schooners during the decades between the wars . But his greatest love was cruising about his beloved Buzzards Bay where he had first wet his toes in Padanaram Harbor and where he and his father (with whom he had had a wonderful relationship) spent many happy times together. This is not a book about racing or even cruising, however, but rather a book about boats and people. The great and successful boats about which Howland writes so well were successful in large part because of the mutual respect and trust that existed among owners, designers, and builders , all three of whom are vividly brought to life by one who knew them all personally. The author SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984