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Readers of Country Life have long been familiar with Michael Bouquet's articles on ships and sailors past and present. In this book he brings the same skill and accuracy to the story of an industry and a way of life that have disappeared within living memory.
Throughout the last century the narrow seas around our islands were crowded with small craft of many different kinds busily engaged in the thriving trade that had made Britain the world's greatest maritime power. Ketches, snows, schooners, brigs, hoys-they were all built, financed, and manned in the small ports and havens which once flourished as self-contained communities along the shores of England. Today their link with the sea has almost vanished and what fame they retain derives from the holiday trade rather than shipping. Salcombe, Appledore, Watchet, Porlock, Minehead, Barnstaple in the west and, farther east, Lewes, Arundel, Littlehamp-ton-it was from these ports and numerous others like them that generations of seamen sailed on the Newfoundland run for salt cod, to Scandinavia for timber, to the Azores for fruit, on voyages that were as exciting, as dangerous -and as fast-as the great races run by the grain and tea clippers.
Michael Bouquet knows these ships, and the men who sailed in them, not only from twenty-Have years of research but also from first-hand experience gained as a deckhand on some of the last of them to survive. Superbly illustrated with over thirty contemporary photographs and engravings, this book will be invaluable to historians, whether maritime, economic or local, but it is first and foremost a readable and stirring account of an age that has vanished and yet remains part of every Englishman's abiding heritage.
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