FROM AN EARLY AGE it was this image in particular, by artist Rockwell Kent, and a few others like it, that were pressed into my mind as nearly Jungian archetypes of what a life afloat must be like. There were several of Kent's dynamic high-contrast wood-block prints hanging about our house while I was growing up, most of them of nautical subjects, and they made an enormous impression on me. Later, when I was older, my grandfather presented me with one of Kent's books, N by E, which had just been reissued by the Weslayan University Press. This made an even bigger impression.

It helped, of course, that several of the prints I'd long admired turned out to be illustrations from the book. It helped, too, that Kent's prose style is just as muscular and dynamic as his illustrations. The art in the book takes up nearly as much space as the text, and the two complement each other exceedingly well. Together they today seem a tad archaic and mannered (delightfully so, IMHO), but they also present a unique account of cruising under sail in what almost amounts to a very modern "graphic-novel" format.

Before Joshua Slocum could become the man we remember today--the one who invented bluewater cruising by sailing around the world singlehanded in a rebuilt oyster smack named Spray--his prior life first had to be unmade. Identifying such turning points is sometimes an arbitrary business, but in Slocum’s case there is little doubt about when his world was first turned upside down. The date most certainly was July 25, 1884, when his first wife, Virginia, age 34, died after a brief illness aboard the family’s 138-foot bark Aquidneck in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Of all the deities we sailors must cope with while messing around on our boats none are more ravenous than the dreaded Bilge Gods. As long as there have been bilges on boats, these bogeymen have been lurking down there, waiting patiently to consume any Very Important Object an innocent mariner might temporarily hold in his or her hand.

Even if you are on deck, or at the very top of your rig, as far from the bilge as you can possibly get, it is a proven fact that all you need do is let your grip on a Very Important Object slip for but an instant and said object will immediately be transported all the way down to where these greedy gremlins can have at it.

Cast into the past to find the founding figure of bluewater feminism, the first in the line that leads to such modern-day characters as Isabelle Autissier, Ellen MacArthur, and Samantha Davies, and you bump up hard against a woman named Ann Davison. She is remembered today, when she is remembered at all, as the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic. She is also something of an enigma, wrapped up in several ironies. Chief among these is the fact that she probably never would have thought to go to sea in the first place had she not fallen in love with a sailor.

During much of that long night as our fine Alden schooner, Constellation, lay crippled on her side in the river, I found myself thinking of the bulls.

Tim, the first mate, and I had gone to see them at the Plaza del Toros in Puerto de Santa Maria, across the bay from Cadiz, not long after we first landed in Spain. Neither of us had ever witnessed a bullfight before, so initially we’d had trouble grasping what was happening. It seemed unfair that one bull should have to fight all those men--the picadors, the banderilleros, the haughty matador with his sword and cape--and as one animal after another slumped to the sand lathered in blood, I could not help but feel that their deaths were cruel and meaningless.

The recent sinking of the Canadian school ship Concordia and the memory it roused in me of the earlier sinking, almost 50 years ago, of Chris Sheldon's school ship Albatross ties into a strong flood tide that has long flowed through my brain. It in fact first started flowing just about 40 years ago when, at age 13, I found a paperback copy of Ernest K. Gann's Song of the Sirens stashed on the shelves of a lending library in a U.S. Army field hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. The book's cover (seen here) was so attractive I at once swiped it (the whole book, not just the cover) and quickly devoured it whole. On finishing it I at once swore to myself I would one day sail across an ocean. Fortunately (or not), I eventually kept that promise, and this had all sorts of consequences, one of which is the blog you are now reading.

To put it more succinctly: I love this book. I urge you to read it, too, for there is a very good chance you'll have the same reaction.