Bookmarks Magazine's "101 Best Sea Books"

The year is 1902, the place Auckland, New Zealand, on the deck of the Tilikum. Captain Jack Voss is interviewing yet another potential mate on his two-man round-the-world journey in a sailboat made out of a red-cedar canoe. Since setting out from British Columbia, he has lost one mate overboard and several others to seasickness and temptations in port. After ascertaining that this candidate, an Irish ex-clergyman, can steer a yacht, Voss asks the apparently frivolous and yet perhaps most critical question of all: "Can you tell a good story?"

The would-be mate rips off a tale—a "real crackerjack"—on the spot and earns the dubious honor of a berth in Voss’s extraordinary canoe.

Storytelling is intrinsic to the sea. Ever since man learned to sail long distances, he has amused himself and his fellow crew by telling stories. Or, as John McPhee writes in his book Looking for a Ship: " All through a voyage while nothing happens, sailors tell stories about things that happen."

Life at sea can be tedious and the hours lonely, but things do happen. Just ask Odysseus or the Ancient Mariner, or Cook or Ahab, or Hornblower or Queeg. Since time immemorial, young men have gone to sea to prove themselves, fallen men to escape their troubles, ambitious men to discover new lands or to make fortunes or to gain fame by setting new records of distance and speed. Since time immemorial, men have also gone to sea to fight. And while it may be true, as Joseph Conrad says, that the ocean is a brute that has "no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory," it has been exceedingly generous in one way: sailors and their chroniclers have recorded and conjured up a singular body of literature upon its waves.

This body of work spans three millennia, covers a fascinating swath of history, and includes some of the towering works in the English language. From Moby-Dick to Jaws, from Scylla and Charybdis to the perfect storm, from the Pequod to the Titanic, sea literature defines danger for us. In the voyages of Cook, Dana, Riley, Shackleton, Heyerdahl, and Slocum, it takes us on adventures to the boundaries of our globe. And in the strange unhingings of Ahab, Queeg, and Crowhurst, it allows us to see the outer limits of the inner mind.

It was Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, a roman-fleuve of the Age of Nelson only completed in recent years, that rekindled my passion for sea literature, which had been suckled by Homer and Hermann Melville and Conrad. In the wood-paneled library of the New York Yacht Club, for days on end, sailors’ stories enveloped me. I could crack open a book and soon find myself on frozen shrouds fighting an angry storm off Cape Horn, shipwrecked on the uncharted Saharan coast, in the midst of an epic sea battle, whaling, pirating, treasure hunting, or trading with natives in the South Seas.

Out of this wonderful chaos of sea books—of memoirs, histories, biographies, and novels—we (for I have had the help of some generous friends) have culled here the best books, regardless of era or genre, that any good library of the sea should possess. Some of the books are recognized classics, while some are mostly forgotten. (Ever heard of The Lightship, The Real McCoy, or The Last Grain Race? You’ll be glad you have now.) Some are explorers’ firsthand accounts, some are great histories or biographies, others are fiction. All but six of the books were written in the past two centuries.

It has been said that every great book is a response to another. Certainly many a sea book has inspired another voyage, which in turn has inspired another book. In modern times, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (list #5) has stirred so many sailor-readers that there is even a book about the voyages of voyagers who set out to repeat his pioneering raft ride. Before that, Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (#16), inspired dozens, including Captain Voss’s canoe voyage, recounted in The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss (#76).

Slocum himself reads Christopher Columbus and James Cook on his way to Cape Horn—a place saturated with the lore of voyagers’ battles with arctic winds, violent storms, and warlike natives. The Horn is a palimpsest of stories and histories, layered with Magellan (#92), Cook (#8), Darwin (#13), and Dana (#6). Windjammer sailors of the early 20th century left their mark in such classic accounts as A. J. Villiers’s By Way of Cape Horn (#36) and Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race (#22). Cape Horn continues to be shaped not just by the currents of wind and water but by a tide of sailors’ stories.

The more one reads, the more one discovers the continuity and interconnectedness of the great library of the sea across the ages. It is fascinating to follow the threads—from Moby-Dick (#2) to Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea (#40), from Bligh (#34) to Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty Trilogy (#11) to Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty (#59).C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books (#9), which were the spiritual descendant of Captain Frederick Marryat’s oeuvre (#24), gave birth to O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (#4). Upon Forester’s death in 1966, his American publisher wrote O’Brian to see if he would like to try his hand at a series. The result: Master and Commander.

Richard Hughes’s novel In Hazard (#19) openly borrows from "Typhoon," and Graham Greene praises Hughes for having the gumption to steal from Conrad’s iconic tempest and get away with it. In The Sea Around Us (#32), Rachel Carson recommends Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea (#80). Lothar-Günther Buchheim alludes to the same work in Das Boot (#7), as his submarine commander reads an account of a raging Conrad storm to his crew while they themselves are battling a storm in the North Atlantic.

In Long John Silver (#46), Bjorn Larsson tells the life story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous bad boy in Treasure Island (#20), and in The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower (#90), C. Northcote Parkinson chronicles the life of C. S. Forester’s fictional hero, Hornblower. More recently, Gary Kinder and Robert Kurson have combined new adventures with old stories in their gripping treasure-hunting accounts Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (#26) and Shadow Divers (#64), respectively.

These wonderful books are but a few of those that connect with earlier, classic works of the sea. You will undoubtedly make many new such discoveries of your own.

The Art of the List

We based our choices on a number of criteria. Readability and good storytelling, historical significance, insight into life at sea and the human experience, a gripping plot, humor, and originality all mattered.

While we often found ourselves in the difficult position of comparing apples to oranges, the mixing of the genres serves a purpose. It introduces more possibilities, particularly for readers who tend to stick solely to either fiction or nonfiction. In order to make the list more well-rounded, we also set seemingly arbitrary parameters. For instance, for the sake of breadth and diversity, once an author made the list with one title, it was more difficult for him or her to land another book on the list. While some notable books by great authors may be absent, the list benefits from having more authors and more subjects. For the same reason, we considered a trilogy or a series as one title. Thus you will find the 20 novels of the Aubrey-Maturin series occupying one line, as you will C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series and the trilogies of Golding and Nordhoff and Hall.

We feel that by exposing readers to a greater number of worthy authors, many of whom might otherwise be lost in the shadows of the canonized authors, we are serving the interests of readers and writers (and sailors) best. We hope that you discover many new books—and even better, many new authors whose bodies of work will reward your continued exploration.
The Contributors

A number of sea-literature experts made invaluable contributions to the creation of this list, namely, Ron Chambers, former director of the Naval Institute Press; Tom Cutler, senior acquisitions editor of the Naval Institute Press; Robert Foulke, professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College and editor for literature of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History; Greg Gibson, head of Ten Pound Island Book Co.; John Hattendorf, Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History; Louis Parascandola, associate professor of English at Long Island University; and Tom Philbrick, professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Equally as meaningful were the contributions of sea-literature aficionados Bruce Coffey, Sr., Patrick Darby, Mike Douglas, Commander Brad Holt (USN), David Roth, and John Wigmore. Finally, the list would not have been possible without my man Friday, Bruce Coffey, Jr., whose devotion to this project was extraordinary, as is his capacity for devouring books and remembering what is in them. My hearty thanks to all.