Blow the Man Down!: A Yankee Seaman’s Adventures Under Sail
About this ebook
Though he called himself a common sailor, James H. Williams (1864-1927) was a most uncommon man. An African-American seaman with reddish hair, he left his Massachusetts home to go to sea at the age of eleven. Yet in spite of his limited formal education, he, wrote in later life with a verve and color that many professional writers would envy. Although he had once killed a man in escaping from a hell-ship at Hong Kong, Williams possessed a high sense of moral virtue. A practical man who survived countless storms and two major shipwrecks, he instinctively sought out the ships of masts and spars in an age in which the merchant marine was making its transition from sail to steam. Within him, too, burned a reforming fervor so intense that he became an uncompromising—and highly effective—enemy of all who preyed upon the common seaman.
Vivid, salty, and enlivened by an unfailing sense of humor, James H. Williams’ reminiscences form a remarkable chronicle of life and adventure under sail and along the waterfronts of deep-water ports from America to China. Here are the thrill of the whale hunt and the terror of a boat’s crew as an infuriated whale capsizes them. Here are episodes of hardship and the brutality of bucko captains and mates that belied the beauty of taut, queenly ships. Here, too, are magnificent accounts of sailing ships and the stalwart men who manned them; of heroic deeds; of exotic anchorages and boisterous sprees ashore; of the immensity of the sea and its awe-inspiring gales and typhoons; of shipwreck in the English Channel on a bitter winter night; of drifting on a spar in the lonely South Atlantic and surviving for three months on an uninhabited island.
About the author
James H. Williams (1864-1927) was an African-American seaman with reddish hair and light-brown skin. He was born on May 21, 1864 in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of James C. and Margaret Crotty Williams and went to sea at an early age. It was in 1897 that he first began to write about life in the old merchant marine. He was then thirty-three years old and had been a sailor for twenty-one years. Hamilton Holt, then the managing editor of the Independent, a prominent national magazine, opened the columns of his journal to Williams and subsequently prints over thirty articles and editorials from Williams’ pen. Williams died in Manhattan, New York on August 24, 1927, aged 63. Warren F. Kuehl was an Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and the author of the biography of Hamilton Holt. He discovered James H. Williams’ manuscript among the papers of the late Hamilton Holt, President of Rollins College and former editor of The Independent magazine. The book Blow the Man Down!: A Yankee Seaman’s Adventures Under Sail is based upon that manuscript and upon the same recollections as published separately many years ago in The Independent and another periodical. Now edited and arranged a chronological narrative by Mr. Kuehl they form an unforgettable portrayal life and conditions under sail. Blow Man Down! is an important contribution to American seafaring literature.
