Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had no means of avoiding the storms. When ships were sunk, many of the crew, particularly the women and children, were lost, and others were drowned after surviving the wreck. Sailors who were rescued at sea, or in port, were often treated brutally, and their stories were usually buried in silence. Even when an incident such as that of the Flying Fish entered the general knowledge of the British public, sailors on board did not have the opportunities to tell their own stories.
This changed with the publication of the 1814 biography A First-Rate Ship, by Andrew Taylor, which claimed to be based on personal experience, and was designed to reach both the general public and the professional community of professional sailors, particularly naval officers, with whom Taylor had frequent contact. It described a series of encounters with the sea in a variety of vessels, from the private sloop he captained on short voyages to the frigate he served in for sixteen months, before being despatched to the West Indies in October 1808, and it contains details of sailing, weather, and ocean conditions on voyages throughout the world. The story was written in a lively and anecdotal style which appealed to the general public, and it included descriptions of the sea in the form of narratives. These were the first to be written from an American perspective, and they contributed significantly to the growing cultural memory of the sea on which the United States had drawn as it grew into a self-conscious nation.
In this way, with the publication of this pioneering book in 1814, a new form of remembrance was created in the British Isles, one which drew on local knowledge, oral testimony, and personal reminiscences to create an account of the sea, its nature, and its dangers. There was much popular entertainment for the spectator in the theatre or on the standpipes, public addresses for the lecture circuit and in schoolrooms, and a growing demand for professional knowledge of the sea.
In the United States, however, this sea memory was initially less common than the local narratives which were published. These were based, in America, on the work of the professional writers for the press, who found the sea their subject, and they tended to focus on particular voyages. In the early 1800s, for example, the New England press published several books of sea narratives. One of the earliest of these was the 1808 The Narrative of a Five Years Residence, on board the brig Brig Joseph, of Salem, in North America, of the adventures and incidents which befell the writer while she was among the islands of St John's, and of one among the islands of Antigua in the West Indies. The stories collected in this book were written by one Elizabeth Wells, who tells a rather similar story to the one told in Taylor's book.
In contrast to the narrative of a story, the sea stories of the period are typically in the form of poems, ballads, or sea songs. The most famous of these is a poem, written by John Wilson, better known by his nickname, Long John Silver. It was published in 1820, in the Philadelphia Evening Post. A famous and complex character, Silver was a pirate who, together with the legendary Captain Flint, fought against the British, in the South Sea and American Revolutionary wars. The sea songs of the period are also written in the form of ballads, and were often inspired by, or related to, the sea. For example, many were written by the British, and one of the most well-known was, How the Sailors Picked Up the Nails, a poem written by Thomas Campbell in 1805.
As a medium for sea stories, all of these types of narratives, the sea stories, the sea songs, and the sea poems, tended to be less popular than sea-themed novels. Some authors, such as John Cleland, wrote several such novels. However, they had little appeal for the general public.
In contrast, a sea-themed novel was an immediate success. It came to the attention of the reading public in a new way, when it was serialized in the newspapers in 1839, at the height of the whaling boom in New Bedford. It had an immediate appeal, and was reprinted in a variety of formats, and became, within a very short time, an iconic book in the United States, known as Moby-Dick or, as Charles Dickens described it in his 1869, A Tale of Two Cities:
The book is about a whale, and I believe, has been generally acknowledged to be the most remarkable book that ever was written, as it is now acknowledged to be the most remarkable of all possible books.
This tale of a heroic whaling voyage inspired a number of other sea-themed stories and novels. By 1875, an author named Rufus Wilmot Griswold published in The Atlantic Monthly, the first of a series of articles, in which he told the story of Captain Ahab, based on the work of Herman Melville. This success stimulated the production of several other sea-themed novels, such as Joseph Conrad's, Victory.
In Britain, one of the earliest sea-themed novels was A Voyage Round the World, by Charles Wilkins, published in 1811. The title page of the novel is signed ‘W.S.’, but is later considered to be a self-description by the author of his pseudonym, William S. Scovell. This novel deals with the life and adventures of an artist in the Mediterranean. It is in the tradition of sea literature, and is an early example of the Romantic vein of British sea literature which continued to flourish in this period.
Notwithstanding the popularity of sea-themed novels and stories in Britain, and the sea songs of the United States, by 1845, the sea was still regarded with a certain amount of fear by many members of the British public, as a place which was both dangerous and unpredictable. The success of A First-Rate Ship, by Andrew Taylor, helped to change this.
An earlier book, The Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, During the Years 1802, 1803, 1804, by James Weddell, was published in 1811. During a later voyage, Weddell became aware that he had inadvertently circumnavigated the world twice. His book describes a journey around the world in the frigate, Hebrides, and was intended to be a popular account of the experience for the general public, rather than a more academic treatise which would attract a professional audience. Nevertheless, the book contains a number of fascinating details about the conditions and actions of life at sea, and, because of his earlier ship, which had survived a storm, is the earliest source of information on sea life in the nineteenth century, giving a valuable description of the behaviour of ships and their crews, and the conditions and actions of life in the ship itself, from sailing on ship to life at sea.
As part of the first part of his book, which dealt with the conditions of the ship and his experience in it, Weddell described, in some detail, the experience he had on a voyage to the South Seas in the ship, before she was wrecked. He tells of his experiences on voyages throughout the world, not only in the frigate, but also on ships which had, for various reasons, failed to reach their destination. On his return voyage from the South Seas, Weddell explains that he had made a number of discoveries, which he hopes to put into a second part of the book. As he writes, he continues: ‘it is impossible to relate such scenes without thrilling the heart, and enrapturing the soul. It will be the history of the voyage, in what must appear to the reader an incomprehensible chaos.’ His description of the sea in this volume, the first of its kind, would become a classic, and he contributed to a growing popular interest in the sea and its secrets.
The second part of Weddell's book was not published until 1832, by John Murray, under the title of A Voyage of Discovery. It also deals with a series of voyages of exploration, and details his experiences, with some description of the local people he met.
The third part was not published until 1836, in The South Sea, by Joseph Taylor, a journalist, who recounts the experiences of the officers and crews of a squadron of several ships, as they travelled in various directions on the Pacific coast of the United States.
This work was the most famous, and most adventurous, account of the entire Pacific coast of the United States. Its success, and the dramatic descriptions in the book of a series of shipwrecks and survivors, stimulated the work of others. In 1839, Francis Preston published, in New Bedford, The Log of a Whaling Vessel, in which he recorded the details of his entire life in a whaling ship for eleven years, from the age of sixteen, until his arrest in a harbour in Japan.
On 22 February 1842, Charles Wood detailed his experiences in a series of articles, in The Times, giving a rather detailed account of life and adventure in his vessel, The Neptune. He also described some of the sights which he saw, which were not well received by the local community. On his voyage home from the Pacific, he recounts his adventures, and describes in particular the sinking of the ship, in which the crew had lost their lives. As he writes in a typical paragraph, about the ship, which he would describe as his vessel, as he sailed on, until it sank, on 22 February: ‘The scene
