Around Cape Horn: A Maritime Artist/Historian's Account of His 1892 Voyage

Much has been recorded about the American clipper ships and the British tea clippers of an earlier era and even more about the windjammers, mostly British or Scandinavian, of a later era, but very little, to my knowledge, of the size and type ship featured in this book, that is to say a medium sized (880 tons), American, workaday cargo bark of the 1890's closely related to the downeasters. The author, previously known mostly to a select group of ship model builders for his master works on that subject, is one I have admired for most of my life. I now find he has also written an authentic narrative of his first voyage to sea in 1892-93, when he had the audacity to pass himself off as an able bodied seaman when in fact he had no experience except small boat sailing. How this story remained hidden and unpublished for over 100 years is beyond me, but thankfully it is no longer hidden and is out there for all sailing ship lovers to savor and put on their shelves near Alan Villiers, Basil Lubbock, Richard Henry Dana, Felix Riesenberg, Arthur H. Clark, Course, Learmont, Stenhouse, Barker and others. The bark James A. Wright had a surprisingly small twelve man crew for a square-rigger almost 200 feet long including two bully mates, typical of the era, eight seamen, one cook and one boy. No mention is made of a bosun, sailmaker or carpenter. The skipper was a hard-nosed Cape Codder with a soft streak, untypical of the era. The narrative includes most of the usual ingredients of a Cape Horn voyage, gales, cold weather, poor food, deplorable conditions in the fo'c'sle, but also some rare ones written from the observant eye of an artist. For example stealing fresh water from the cask with a straw made from the author's sketch pad paper, the harrowing near collision with another ship while the mate slept on watch, rat hunting, bringing the pilot's cutter alongside with the ship having considerable headway, dirty dishes and dirty laundry and of course the arcane details of sail handling. The chapters are all headed with authoritative sketches by the author some made during the voyage others evidently reconstructed later on. The additional bonus of the ship's scale drawings and rare photo when new are something for model builders to study and refer to as they read the book. The only fault I could find with Davis' narrative was his insistance on referring to the ship's speed as "knots per hour" instead of just "knots." This error is repeated two or three times in the book and is understandable because of his lack of formal knowledge of navigation. In fact many seagoing people make the same mistake. I highly recommend this book to ship lovers, readers of authentic sea stories, maritime history and rousing adventures. The author's grandson is to be complimented for finally bringing the old manuscript to light and turning it over to a skillful editor who had the wisdom to maintain the author's vernacular. Anyone who has ever seen a Charles G. Davis ship model

Reading this book started me on the search for others like it. Recently, I read Sailing Ships of New England by George Francis Dow, another famous boat builder. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. It's full of great illustrations and makes for a great follow-up to Around Cape Horn.

This book came to light recently, and is one of the good ones. Many tales of adventure on tall ships give a general view of a sailor's life. This one gives the account of a boy who grew into a man on his voyage to the phosphate mines of Chile. Once in the Pacific, a few bad ideas led to danger for the author and agravation for his captain. Descriptions of moonlight on the breast of a sail, or how the weather clew was raised on an overtaking iron vessel that passed below their stern - are poetry without the writer realizing. A book not to be passed over, but passed around to your friends.