 | Books & Boats Blog
by Clyde W. Ford
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I’m honored that PassageMaker Magazine invited me to be the online editor of their new “Books & Boats Blog.” I’ve been “messing-about in boats”—as the saying goes—for over twenty years, about the same length of time that I’ve been writing books.
Boats and books have a long, intertwined history. Nautical tales comprise much of literary history. We might remember Homer’s portrayal of the sea journeys of Odysseus as well Jason and his crew, the argonauts, in search of the Golden Fleece. This tradition of stories set at sea carried on through writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Hemingway.
Ancient societies did not have books, but they did have great stories told as myths. Here, too, the sea played a central role in myths from coastal Africa, Europe, North and South America, Asia, and from Polynesia.
Boats, on the other hand, have served as powerful crucibles for the writer’s mind. Few think of Alex Haley, author of Roots, as a nautical writer. Yet, when this former Coast Guard Chief Petty officer needed to focus on his writing he’d book passage on a freighter plowing the seas.
For most of human history, the sea has been the great unknown, and the horizon that dividing line between the mundane world and a fantastical world populated by the human imagination. Now the oceans are charted and the movement of tides and currents well-understood. Most of the denizens of the deep have been photographed and studied.
Yet, humans still take to the sea for adventure and inspiration. The horizon still calls us even when we know in general terms what lies beyond it. Heading out in a small boat over a large body of water still kindles a wonder and fear, passion and anxiety that our ancestors eons ago must have known. It pits us against the same eternal forces of wind, weather, and water.
A growing number of people have taken to boating not just as a pastime but as a lifestyle, choosing to spend all or part of their time living aboard and cruising. Each year, thousands of boaters venture along the Inside Passage, around the Great Circle, and across the earth’s oceans. Rivers, oceans, and great lakes long have been the jumping off points of human adventure, and the centers of communities like whaling, fishing, and forestry, that rose up at the water’s edge.
Add literature to this list of communities. Whether we actually set foot in a boat, or book passage on one that exists only in a writer’s mind, the adventure beyond the water’s edge still remains.
In this Books & Boats Blog, I’ll review literature which reflects this nautical lifestyle we cherish—writings of and about ancient and modern mariners. We’ll sail aboard old wooden schooners as well as today’s fiberglass trawlers with characters, sometimes real sometimes fictional, whose dreams, like ours, are orchestrated by the sea’s swells. Fiction, nonfiction, technical, adventure stories, true life tales, nautical thrillers, guide books, local history in cruising areas; like pirates of yore everything about the “bounding main” will be fair game.
Swashbuckler I am, I’ll also “call ’em like I read ’em.” I won’t be afraid to run a good book up the mast or force a bad one off the plank. And I’ll invite readers of this blog to do the same—sharing their take on the books I review or suggesting books that should be reviewed. The interactive power of the PassageMaker Magazine website makes this all possible.
My hope is to present “themed reviews” where all the books in a given blog are at least loosely connected. Some of the themes I’m planning: historical books related to the Inside Passage and the Great Circle routes; local histories of places boaters frequent; a line-up of nautical thrillers and mysteries; biographies of nautical figures; women’s tales of the sea; and a continued focus on the best contemporary nautical writing about.
I also have in mind that among our community of boaters and readers we ought to be able to come up with a list of “must have” books that every boat should have aboard. What ten books would be on your list?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than the ones that you did do,” said nautical author Mark Twain. “So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
I look forward to exploring, dreaming, and discovering with you through the pages of great nautical literature and through this blog.
| Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, who has written articles for PassageMaker Magazine. His Charlie Noble Novels, Red Herring and Precious Cargo are nautical thrillers set along the Inside Passage. And his latest nonfiction book is on environmental boating, Boat Green: 50 Steps Boaters Can Take to Help Save Our Waters. For the past decade he’s cruised the Inside Passage in his 30-foot, 1977 Willard trawler, Mystic Voyager. | 
Mystic Voyager in Bella Coola, British Columbia
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