Years ago I read "In the Heart of the Sea" and I was enthralled. I still think about that book and would love to read more like it. Earlier this week I went to look for something in this vein, but the bookstore only had books about maritime battles and things like that. I would love some suggestions!
by Decent_Wear_6235
7 Comments
I hear it is unsurprisingly heavy, but it’s supposed to be good. The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker.
Also, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson. It’s good.
The Perfect Storm is a very interesting read. Not as much about ships as it is the oceans and storms.
Chesapeake Requiem
From Amazon:
Tangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. They are separated from their countrymen by the nation’s largest estuary, and a twelve-mile boat trip across often tempestuous water—the same water that for generations has made Tangier’s fleet of small fishing boats a chief source for the rightly prized Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and has lent the island its claim to fame as the softshell crab capital of the world.
Yet for all of its long history, and despite its tenacity, Tangier is disappearing. The very water that has long sustained it is erasing the island day by day, wave by wave. It has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850, and still its shoreline retreats by fifteen feet a year—meaning this storied place will likely succumb first among U.S. towns to the effects of climate change. Experts reckon that, barring heroic intervention by the federal government, islanders could be forced to abandon their home within twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the graves of their forebears are being sprung open by encroaching tides, and the conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.
Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island’s past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier’s people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways. What emerges is the poignant tale of a world that has, quite nearly, gone by—and a leading-edge report on the coming fate of countless coastal communities.
I haven’t read it yet but The Wager has been getting a lot of acclaim and seems like it would be up your alley.
Look at Philbrick’s other books. That is literally his wheelhouse.
The Curve of Time is another good one
Amazon says: Widowed at the age of thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed up her five children in the summers that followed and set out aboard the twenty-five-foot Caprice. For fifteen summers, in the 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of the West Coast, encountering settlers and hermits, hungry bears and dangerous tides, and falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty.
Driven by curiosity, the family followed the quiet coastline, and Blanchet—known as Capi, after her boat—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the bright stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months.
The Curve of Time weaves the story of these years into a memoir that has inspired generations to seek out their own adventures on the wild West Coast. First published in 1961, less than a year before the author died, Blanchet’s captivating work has become a bestselling classic of travel writing.
The Dove – Robin Lee Graham – solo trip around the world by a kid
Grey Seas Under – Farley Mowat – about marine salvage
Blue Latitudes – Tony Horwitz -about Captain Cook
Two Years Before the Mast – Richard Dana – sailing to California in 1800s