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In his many voyages, the Scottish-born sailor John Nicol twice circumnavigated the globe, visiting every inhabited continent while witnessing and participating in many of the greatest events of exploration and adventure in the eighteenth century. He traded with Native Americans on the St. Lawrence River and hunted whales in the Arctic Ocean. He fought for the British navy against American privateers in the Atlantic Ocean and Napoléon’s navy in the Mediterranean Sea. En route to Australia he met the love of his life, Sarah Whitlam, a convict bound for the Botany Bay prison colony, who bore his son before duty forced them apart forever.
At the end of his journeys, John Nicol returned to his homeland and a life of obscurity and poverty, until the publisher John Howell met him one day while he was wandering the streets of Edinburgh, searching for dregs of coal to fuel his hearth. After hearing the fascinating stories of Nicol’s seafaring experiences, Howell convinced him to write his memoirs—the publication of which eventually earned Nicol enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days.
Tim Flannery has edited Nicol’s original text, providing accompanying footnotes and an introduction (updated for this North American edition) that give historical context to the sailor’s exploits.
“Lively . . . Exciting . . . Nicol has made a lasting place for himself in the literature of the sea and the ships he loved so deeply.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 7, 2015 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780802191106
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780802191106
- File size: 1299 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 4, 1999
The life of a late-18th-century sailor was, to steal a quote from Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Frequent European wars and revolutions made life at sea so perilous that, as Flannery notes, a crew mortality rate of 15% per year was not considered unusual. Yet John Nicol (1755-1825), a Scotsman of humble beginnings, managed to survive a quarter of a century at sea during which he fought against Napoleon's navy, battled pirates, befriended natives of China, Jamaica and Hawaii, and twice circumnavigated the globe. On one voyage, he even found time to marry a convict bound for Australia (but soon lost her when he was compelled to ship out, leaving wife and child behind; he tried to get back to her and never could, eventually marrying another woman). At the end of his long career, Nicol returned home to Edinburgh, where, for over a decade, he was forced to hide from the press gangs who were eager to return a salty old tar to service in the Royal Navy. At the age of 67, a chance meeting with an eccentric bookbinder gave him the opportunity to publish this autobiography, which has now been rediscovered and reissued. Nicol may have been just a common seaman, but he is a superb narrator with a surprisingly modern voice and a gift for noting odd details (such as the "wooden jacket," a barrel with holes cut for the head and arms, inside of which hapless sailors and prisoners were confined as punishment). Equal parts history, diary and adventure story, his book wonderfully describes what it was like to traverse the globe in one of the most tumultuous periods in human history.
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