REVIEWS Out-of-print Maritime Books for the Collector & Casual Reader
DOWAGER BOOKS P.O. Box 1836-S , Lafayette CA 94549 Tel: 4 15-283 -0201 FREE CATALOG!
J. Tuttle Maritime Books 1806 Laurel Crest
Madison, WI 53705
Catalog upon request of out-of-print books on the sea, ship and the sailor.
The Wreck
and Rescue of the Schooner
J.H. Hartzell
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It was dark as pitch at 3:00am Oct. 18th , 1880. The night was calm and the winds were light. Captain William Jones guided his Schooner toward the harbor. With unbelievable quickness, the winds shifted and a raging storm descended on Lake Michigan . The ship ran aground. To escape the violent surf, the crew took refuge in the rigging.
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The rescue that followed went down in history as one of the most beroic and challenging of the United States Life Saving Service. This film faithfully re-creates a true adventure on the Great Lakes. Endorsed by the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History.
58 Minutes - Color - NTSC - VHS Available for only S39 .95 (plus tax and S2.50 shipping). Licensed for private home use only. Licensing is available for public and educational use.
~ Brauer Productions 402 Cass Street Traverse City, Ml 49684 • (616) 941-0850
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passing ship, was tracked down by the Admiralty after a long search and given all his arrears of pay. It was a hard world, is the picture that emerges, but a surprisingly fair one, in which "senseless brutality" was sought out and puni shed , and a seaman 's rights were more respected than, for instance, aboard the infamous " blood boats" in Cape Hom trade under the American flag less than l 00 years ago. PS Brilliant Passage. . . A Schooning Memoir, by Philip Gerard (Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic CT, 1989, 8lpp, illus, $10.00pb) Standing to windward across a halycon sea with all the wash hung out, the beautiful schooner yacht Brilliant sails invitingly across the cover of this handsome volume which details her construction, her trans-Atlantic voyaging and ocean racing in the 1930s, and her postwar sailing under Briggs Cunningham, down to her present-day career as a roving emissary of Mystic Seaport Museum. Written by a Brilliant aficionado (but then, who isn' t), the text tell s its story engag ingly, so that happy summer scenes of 50 years ago seem to have happened just the other day. Fortunate ship--she has had the kind of owners that cared for her, kept her beautiful and sai led her hard and well; and now she's found a first-class biographer to tell her PS facinating story . Scrimshaw: Variations on a Theme, by Martha Bowen (Privately printed, Gloucester MA, 1988 , 306pp, illus, no price) Born of the author's involvement in a scrimshaw store in Sausalito, this book traces with verve and authority the practice of whaletooth and ivory carving in collections around the country, and among scrimshanders working today, with tales of old whaling trips, explorations in seaport towns from San Francisco to Nantucket, and brief biographies of today 's artists. PS Scow Schooners of San Francisco Bay, by Roger R. Olmsted (California History Center, Cupertine CA, 1989, 96pp, illus, $14.95pb) Square-ended, steered by extension tiller from the tops of the towering haystacks they so often carted from upriver farms to the hungry stables of the city, these maids-of-all-work, the scow schooners of San Fransisco, are summoned forth from their fugitive, almost underground existence, into the full light of day by this splendid photographic documentary by Roger Olmsted. Olmsted was a devoted student of workaday things and, according to Karl
Kortum , was responsible more than any one person for the revival of the traditional regatta of working sailing craft, the Master Mariner's Race, which has now become an annual fixture in the bay. This "witty and outrageous intellectual ," as Kortum , his boss for several years in the old San Francisco Maritime Museum, calls him in his introduction to thi s book , conducted other imaginative research and publishing projects , from recording a Gold Rush Ship discovered in an excavation , to developing the life hi story of the still-floating schooner C.A. Thayer-all, as Kortum rightly notes, with the "attention to exquisite detail that marks an artist." His wife Nancy , equally devoted to the work, completed this beautiful volume following Roger's untimely death in 1981 at age 54. "Many a seagoing man envied the simple, independent life of a schooner man, " this book observes, and that simple, but proudly independent way of life is well remembered in this lively and PS authoritative record. Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises, ed. Richard Harrison and M.M. Bryden (Facts on File, New York NY, 1988, 240pp, illus , $35.00hb) This book combines breathtaking photography with outstanding articles by leading scientists on every facet of the behavior and history of dolphins, porpoises and whales. Sleek bodies arc above blue seas. Whales lunge high in the air or coast silently beneath the waves. Maps and graphics outline species development and history . SMF Princess-New York, by Joe Richards (The Marine Museum of Dunedin FL, 1989 repr. of 1956 orig., 258pp, illus, $12.95pb) The fledgling Dunedin Marine Museum in Florida should be congratulated for giving the artist-raconteur Joe Richards's "Friendship sloop Princess a home. And you'll congratulate yourself if you buy Richards 's classic account of his love affair with this beauty, 60 years old and full of rot when he bought her in the spring of 1938. He rebuilt her, and sailed her south along the East Coast amid memorably funny and touching scenes, and his tale recaptures them all, with the wonderful waterfront characters the errant pair fell in with. PS
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1989