Fifty Five Years at Sea Manuscript

Sailors' Snug Harbor, Staten Island, New York 

I sank my last ship, the Schooner Glad Tidings, 100 years ago this past October at St. Mary's Bar on St. Andrews Shoals, Fernandina, Florida. October 16, 1907. I was seventy-one years old.

I moved to Sailors' Snug Harbor a year after that, 100 years ago come next September. The 28th to be precise. September 28, 1908. I was seventy-two years old.

In January 2018, the 28th (to be precise again), my grandson's granddaughter, the girl who wrote the book about my life, will be a year older than I was when I left for The Harbor. She'll be ten years younger than I was when I crossed the bar there on February 2, 1920.

I've been talking with her lately, telling her it's time to let our story be told to those who want to hear it. It's time to put it somewhere that newer generations can find it. 

She's waiting for it to be approved for archiving in a place called Google Books. In the meantime she fixed it so folks can find it here ... in a universal format ... in a public place ... where it can be downloaded to any new-fangled device with a pdf reader. It has 'bookmarks', you know, so you can jump around and look at what suits you, if you like.

It's a bit boring sometimes, and quite interesting sometimes, too. But then -- so was I.

WSN  

Click below to download 
Fifty Five Years at Sea - the complete manuscript

Fifty Five Years at Sea is the story of the author’s great-great-grandfather, Captain William Sewall Nickels (1836-1920). For fifty-five years, he had no fixed address. He was one of the hundreds of nineteenth century master mariners from Maine’s Penobscot region. Captain Nickels spent fifty-five years of his life on merchant sailing vessels, forty-five of them as commander. His wife followed him to sea, and his daughters were raised on his ships.

In words and pictures, it covers seven generations of Captain Nickels’ family from the time his own great-grandparents first settled on the shores of Penobscot Bay, before the American Revolution. It follows his early years on a farm in Prospect (now Searsport), Maine; his fifty-five years as a merchant mariner; his retirement to Sailors’ Snug Harbor in Staten Island, New York; the fates of his children and grandchildren, and the births of his great-grandchildren in the years before his death.

It is a memorial to a simple man, an uncelebrated mariner, who lived long, worked hard, loved deeply, and spent fifty-five years at sea.

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