REVIEWS Built on Honor, Sailed with Skill ; The American Coasting Schooner, Frederick F. Kaiser (Sarah Jennings Press , Ann Arbor MI, 1989, 309pp, illus, $48 hb) Fred Kaiser was born and grew up in the Brooklyn, New York area at a time when the last of the large coasting schooners still earned their way in the bulk transport of cargoes to and from ports along the East Coast of the United States, from Canada to South America. During the 1920s and 1930s they found their livelihood carrying softwood south from Maine and Canada, and hardwood north from the Southern states. There was coal to be carried to ports where discharging facilities were too slow forthe big steamships or barges , or the loading was apt to be delayed. And there were other cargoes; salt from Turk ' s Island, molasses from Barbados or Cuba, logwood from Jamaica or Haiti , goat manure from Venezuela and fi sh scrap from Promised Land, Long Island. The age of sail was rapidly coming to an end by the time Fred Kaiser began to haunt the wharves where schooners could still be found, some laid up in lonely backwaters and others loading or discharging. The active vessels sometimes needed hands to sail them and young men could find a berth, for the wages were low and conditions much worse than in steamships. These old schooners often sailed short handed. Many a young fellow was smitten by the urge to sail in one of these tall-masted, graceful relics of the past and armed with cameras and
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sometimes a diary, they would make a summer trip and get home in time for college. Fred Kaiser made his ship the four-masted schooner Annie C. Ross and he made several voyages in her, as did the marine artist John Noble. Captain Joseph Zuljevic was happy to have these young men aboard. I made a voyage as acting mate of the Annie C. Ross in the early part of 1940. Fred Kaiser was probably in college at the time, but John Noble was one of the crew and a very useful hand. After World War II, Fred Kaiser began writing articles about the old schooners he had known, and about their adventures or eccentricities. These articles are not only about ships he knew , but about record problems of construction, maintenance and manning. He goes into detail about such problems as the hogging of big schooners, and relates his own adventures with a small schooner he brought from Nova Scotia to the Chesapeake. In this book he has brought together the last days of commercial sail on the East Coast in a most interesting, well illustrated fashion. As one who sailed in a number of those old schooners, I have nothing but praise for Built on Honor, Sailed with Skill. FRANCIS E. BOWKER Mystic Seaport Museum Mystic, Connecticut When God Was an Atheist Sailor; Memories of a Childhood at Sea, 1902-1910, Burgess Cogill (W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 1990, 190pp, illus, $17.95hb) Initiation into a love of the sea or the seafaring life can take many forms, for some a passage to adventure, for others an escape. For 87-year-old Burgess Cogill, however, her baptism was the first eight years of her life aboard one of
the last working tall ships, the fivemasted schooner Snow & Burgess. Her memoir is an evocation of two lost eras: the brief but thrilling reign of the great commercial coasting schooner, and the author ' s own years as darling daughter of the ship's captain. Born in 1902 at 10' N, 117' W, a point close to Clipperton Island in the Pacific, and living aboard until finally disembarking to school in San Francisco in 1910, her ken of the sea seems as natural and unforced as a Brooklyn schoolboy ' s love of city parks, theaters and street amusements, or a Midwestern farmboy's yen for the plains and fresh cut hay. Cogill lived in a dual world, a cosy, coddled family life in the well appointed Victorian captain's quarters set in the midst of the rigorous routines of seamen out on deck. For the author and her younger sister it was a life of exploration and adventure stolen from the workaday world of seamen. They romped above decks and below, scarcely heeding the rubric of ship life, indulged by their father, cooks and carpenters alike. They revelled in the captain's prescribed social rounds at the most frequented ports of call, like Puget Sound and San Francisco, but at the same time were awed by luminous moments, watching sea and sky and the unfettered wildlife of the sea. Cogill recreates her early world from indelible memories. She offers an innocent unromanticized view of the sailor's life, a solitary, almost monkish existence that is given great humanity through a child's eyes. She portrays the free-wheeling bustle of the port of San Francisco, and the pristine wilderness of Puget Sound, where her father ' s ship took on lumber on many occasions, both ably enhanced by many period photographs (furnished in part by the Mari-
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