A Book of Sea Journeys

Rawson Wade Publishers, 1981. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good . 9x6x1. Our imagination and physical being constantly go down to the sea for restoration, challenge, and the recovery of primeval memories. In this new treasury of prose and poetry, Ludovic Kennedy captures, in the words of intrepid voyagers and courageous survivors, the many moods and faces of the vast deep. From Hart Crane to Winston Churchill, from two views of Captain Bligh to Commodore Perry's opening of Japan, man's endurance and the ocean's sway is celebrated. Sea Journeys includes the legendary voyages of exploration and discovery recounted by Salazar and Vaz de Caminha, as well as the later voyages of self-discovery as reflected in the memoirs, stories, and letters of such voyagers as Anna Brassey and Sophia Taylor, Stephen Crane and Somerset Maugham. The terror and savagery of the sea is awesomely portrayed by those who made fantastic voyages in small and open boats. Then there are the magical days of the great steamships and ocean liners, from that Leviathan known as The Great Eastern to the eternally fascinating, doomed Titanic -- and the stories of those who sailed aboard and those who survived.Some of the finest writing about man's centuries on the sea comes, as a delightful surprise, from unknown seafarers. Keeping them in goodly company are: Sylvia Plath, Noel Coward, Rudyard Kipling, Melville and Dickens, Masefield and Poe, Conrad and Verne, Waugh and Auden, and many, many others singing the endless song of the sea.