Captain Drew's World

Dispatches from the Age of Global Sail

From 1877 to 1889, as Captain John H. Drew plied the world's oceans aboard the full-rigged ship Sea Witch of Boston, he wrote lengthy dispatches to the Boston Journal. He was a man of action and intellect who crafted closely observed, empathic prose, well-salted with dry wit. Drew described his current and past voyaging in various trades, including the Boston "Straits" trade, the cotton and emigrant trade, the Cape Horn grain trade, the East India ice trade, the Far East case oil trade, the Australian packet trade, and the sugar trade from sleepy ports of the Spanish and Dutch empires that today are teeming megacities. He font of knowledge included the proper stowage of cargoes of pepper, sugar, and firecrackers.

An expert navigator and seaman, Drew also loved music; dabbled in art; studied history, literature, and geography; and was a world-class collector of seashells. He was outspoken against the virulent anti-Chinese bias of the late 1800s. A superlative chronicler of life at sea, Drew was a keen observer of foreign lands and cultures. Drew's later letters reflect a melancholy, the loneliness of a captain's life, the drowning of three of his brothers, and the decline of the once-preeminent American deepwater fleet. As a member of a shipbuilding family with deep maritime roots in Maine's Kennebec River valley, Drew wrote to preserve the record of the passing of an age and his place in it.

Maritime historian and editor W. H. Bunting has compiled Drew's writings and gathered them here with enlightening annotation. Captain Drew's World: Dispatches from the Age of Global Sail provides readers a vivid window onto the great age of sail from both coasts of the United States to the Caribbean, Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, and beyond.

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