Synopses & Reviews
From the author of
Godforsaken Sea -- a #1 bestseller in Canada and “one of the best books ever written about sailing” (
Time magazine) -- comes a magnificent re-creation of a square-rigger voyage round Cape Horn at the end of the 19th century.
In The Way of a Ship, Derek Lundy places his seafaring great-great uncle, Benjamin Lundy, on board the Beara Head and brings to life the ships community as it performs the exhausting and dangerous work of sailing a square-rigger across the sea.
The “beautiful, widow-making, deep-sea” sailing ships could sail fast in almost all weather and carry substantial cargo. Handling square-riggers demanded detailed and specialized skills, and life at sea, although romanticized by sea-voyage chroniclers, was often brutal. Seamen were sleep deprived and malnourished, at times half-starved, and scurvy was still a possibility. Derek Lundy reminds readers what Melville and Conrad expressed so well: that the sea voyage is an overarching metaphor for life itself. As Benjamin Lundy nears the Horn and its attendant terrors, the traditional qualities of the sailor -- fatalism, stoicism, courage, obedience to a strict hierarchy, even sentimentality -- are revealed in their dying days, as sail gave way to steam.
Derek Lundy tells his gripping tale with the kind of storytelling skill and writerly breadth that is usually the ken of our finest novelists, and in so doing, imagines a harrowing and wholly credible history for his seafaring Irish-Canadian ancestor.
About the Author
Derek Lundy is the bestselling author of
Godforsaken Sea: Racing The World's Most Dangerous Waters,
The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail, and
The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland. He lives and rides on Salt Spring Island, B.C.
From the Hardcover edition.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1 -- Down to the Seas
2 -- Un-homing, Up-anchoring
3 -- In Narrow Waters
4 -- The Stateliest, Stiffest Frigate
5 -- That Unsounded Ocean
6 -- The Ocean Paths My Home
7 -- The Circle of Her Traverse of the Sea
8 -- The Uttermost Cape
9 -- The Bloody Horn
10 -- Not a Voyage Complete
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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