John Nichol, mariner and memoirist.
John Nichol, mariner. I would have liked to have known him. Re-reading his episodic memoir (I first read it at sea on a Pacific voyage - the same waters he [...]
Women Aboard!
Women have always been aboard ship. As passengers, girlfriends, and wives. As sailors, surgeons, nurses, helmsmen, and shipmasters. Women aboard — I got caught up in the history back in [...]
Herstory: Seawomen of Iceland
To visit Reykjavik's Maritime Museum you would think there were no seawomen in Iceland's history. (As of November, 2017, that is.) I first came across the mention of Icelandic female [...]
Iceland’s Immigrant Song
Iceland's original immigrant song may have been the poems composed by the helmsmen and women of the open rowboats, to aid them in remembering choice fishing spots. The first immigrants [...]
Women on board
Transgenders serving on ships is nothing new. I’ve long been interested in women on ships in the Age of Sail -- particularly women posing as men, passing as men, doing [...]
The Notorious Captain Hayes; a conversation with author Joan Druett
The American-born seafarer William "Bully" Hayes was a notorious celebrity in his own lifetime and in the century after his death became the antihero of numerous accounts, novels, secondhand memoirs [...]
Weymouth’s First Maritime Literary Festival March 12-13 2016
I'm looking forward to attending England's first maritime literary festival and meeting up with many of my nautical writer friends and acquaintances, and hopefully making new ones. Organized by James [...]
Water Ghosts
Chinese ghosts... I have an abiding fascination in the long history and culture of China. My mother had a lacquer tri-fold screen with small shelves on which she kept some [...]
Coming of Age at Sea: The Guinea Boat
Merellä" (At Sea) Oil on canvas by Albert Edelfelt, a Finnish artist, in 1883. Thanks to Curtis William Erling White and Barista Uno, shipmates aboard All Things Nautical, a [...]
Interview with anthropologist, author, filmmaker, and voyager Sam Low
Bob and I had the pleasure of meeting author Sam Low and his kinsman, navigator Nainoa Thomson at Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, Hawaii, last June at a book talk [...]