Shipwreck off the coast of Ireland!

Hurricane off Cape Hatteras!

It is a wonder that Melatiah Chase and his bride Eliza Ann survived the eleven years they sailed together.

Sailing the Seven Seas is the fascinating true story of sea-going New England families and the packets, East Indiamen and swift clipper ships on which they journeyed to distant ports. The children who were lucky enough to sail with their parents had the ocean for their home and the whole world for their geography book. Their mother taught them to read and write, the first mate taught them navigation, and the sea itself, with its storms and icebergs and dangerous shoals, taught them courage and endurance.

Here is a book as fresh and salty as an ocean breeze, as spicy as the ginger, cloves and fragrant sandalwood which sometimes constituted part of the cargo.

America has always had a proud sea-faring tradition; and some of its proudest moments will be found in this distinguished book.

From the dust jacket

 

Cabin boy at the age of twelve, second mate at seventeen or eighteen, first mate at nineteen, and captain of the ship while still in his early twenties! That was the not unusual pattern for a Yankee boy of courage and intelligence during the great days of sailing.

Mary Ellen Chase, granddaughter of such a sea captain, felt greatly deprived to have been born too late to be reared and schooled on the quarterdeck of a proud square-rigger. Given the chance, she too might have navigated a great clipper through weeks of dread and peril, as did a girls she tells about in this book.

"Courage, ambition and vision were the very fabric of our past," says Miss Chase, "and they alone can assure our future."

Here is a book that bowls along like a clipper under full sail. And its prose has the grace of those trim and handsome ships which had no equal on the Seven Seas.

-- Sterling North, General Editor, from the book.