Jacket flap blurb

The author

John Harland was born in the great shipbuilding city of Belfast in Northern Ireland, but after his medical training he emigrated to Canada. Although the area of British Columbia where he now lives is far from the sea, he has never lost his childhood interest in the sea and ships, devoting most of his spare time to their study. He is a highly active member of the Society for Nautical Research and contributes to its prestigious journal The Mariner's Mirror on a wide range of topics. However, seamanship under sail has been a particular interest for over thirty years, and this book is the result of the widest possible reading — Dr Harland is blessed with a prodigious facility for languages, having a mastery of most major European tongues and a working knowledge of many others. Therefore, he has been able to read and compare virtually every manual and text book ever published on the subject in order to work out how ships were really handled, even down to the smallest detail of shipboard routine. After completing what is virtually a life's work, and as a complete contrast, Dr Harland is currently engaged in studying the development of the steam whalecatcher.

The illustrator

Mark Myers has been drawing and painting ships since his student days in California. As a marine artist he is essentially self-taught, but during his 'apprenticeship' his technical understanding was greatly enhanced by discussions with the older breed of seaman in the San Francisco area, many of whom had first-hand knowledge of square-riggers. He became acquainted with the late Alan Villiers and was able to work during university vacations aboard a number of sailing ships under his command, culminating in 1968 in an invitation to sail as bosun of the Nonsuch, the replica of the seventeenth century ketch built for the Hudson's Bay Company. By this time he had married the daughter of an English maritime historian and settled in Cornwall, in order to concentrate on his painting. Although this is nominally a full-time occupation, he has not given up his active involvement with ships — in 1971 for example, he worked as a rigger on the Golden Hinde replica while she was under construction at Appledore. However, in the last ten years he has become one of the most successful of the new generation of marine artists, and his work, particularly on historical subjects, is highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. Mark Myers is a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists and the Hon Secretary of the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

Jacket painting, 'Convoy Shortening Sail off the Cornish Coast,' by Mark Myers, RSMA, F/ASMA

Jacket back blurb

AN ACCOUNT OF THE SHIPHANDLING OF THE
SAILING MAN-OF-WAR 1600-1860,
BASED ON CONTEMPORARY SOURCES

Numerous successful reprints of contemporary works on rigging and seamanship indicate the breadth of interest in the lost art of handling square-rigged ships. Modelmakers, marine painters and enthusiasts need to know not only how the ships were rigged but also how much sail was set in each condition of wind and sea, how the various manoeuvres were carried out, and the intricacies of operations like reefing, or 'caning' an anchor. Contemporary treatises such as Brady's Kedge Anchor in the USA or Darcy Lever's Sheet Anchor in Britain tell only half the story, for they were training manuals intended to be used at sea in conjunction with practical experience and often only covered officially- condoned practices.

This book, on the other hand, is a modern, objective appraisal of the evidence, concerned with the actualities as much as the theory. The author's facility in a remarkable range of languages has enabled him to study virtually every manual published over a period of nearly four centuries. This gives the book a completely international balance and allows the author to describe for the first time the proper historical development of seamanship among the major navies of the world.

In order to explain even the most complex evolution clearly and concisely, over 350 line drawings were specially commissioned from Mark Myers — not only one of the very best of the present generation of marine artists, but an authority on sailing ships in his own right. The result of this close collaboration is a work which is a superbly produced, and uniquely valuable, contribution to the history of sail.