Help me find some good maritime stories that are not about British Empire or American people or events.
There are plenty of good recommendations for maritime genre novels and stories with an English language perspective or point of view. Aubrey, Hornblower, Moby Dick, Shackelton, Michener, etc etc
My purpose here is to try and find some of all the other great stories about sailors, naval heroes, explores, pirates, traders, Travellers etc who did not speak english as their first language. I mean plenty of other nations have had things going for themon the water.
So the rules are:
– Story should NOT center English, US, Australian, Kiwi characters or events.
– Story should have a clear Martine theme. Naval, exploration, pirates, shipwreck, development etc is all fine.
– Can be any time in history
– Story can be fictional or not, novels, biographies are both welcome as long as they are entertaining.
– Should be a good book, duh
– OK if written by English speaking author
– Nice if available in english..
Cheers
by fromthegreenbench
3 Comments
[Batavia’s Graveyard](https://goodreads.com/book/show/128824.Batavia_s_Graveyard) is interesting, it’s about a mutiny and shipwreck on a Dutch ship in the seventeenth century.
Jan de Hartog’s book The Captain is about a Dutch tugboat captain in WWII, and a very good story it is too.
Thucydides’ book History of the Peloponnesian War has a lot of sea and boat action, and English had not yet been invented when it was written; also the book is a classic of world literature, a real classic.
Far Tortuga, by Peter Matthiessen, is about the Caribbean in the time of the switchover from wind to motor boats; I enjoyed it a lot. Probably would read it again if it popped up, since I’ve forgotten the plot!
Grey Seas Under – Farley Mowat; Non-Fiction – Salvage Tug and it’s adventures from 1930 to 1948