The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

While recent maritime historians have investigated the complexities in the lives of seamen and their communities, few literary studies attend to the influence of print culture on the lives of mariners and their participation in the rise of a uniquely American literature. Hester Blum offers a much-needed literary and cultural critic’s perspective on this important subject.

Blum focuses on first-person narratives written by mariners from the American Revolution to the Civil War, when the sea was America’s fount of economic prosperity and source of national pride. She divides the study into two parts: the first recounts the proliferation of sailors’ nonfiction writing, and the second analyzes what she calls the “epistemology of maritime narratives” (p. 2). She examines works by well-known antebellum authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as noncanonical mariner authors, such as Nathaniel Ames, David Porter, and James Riley, and reveals fascinating implicit interchanges between the relatively forgotten mariner writers and the canonical authors.