The Way Of A Ship: A Square-rigger Voyage In The Last Days Of Sail recreates a sea voyage on one of the last merchant sailing ships near the close of the 19th century, and provides a satisfying blend of historical reconstruction, fictional narrative, and focus on seamanship. It's hard to easily categorize this account: The Way Of A Ship reads like fiction but couples such with rich historical detail, resulting in a multi-faceted guide.

Lundy wrote a book I've been looking long to find. He writes of the day to day life of sailors from the 19th century that is very knowledgable and page turning. I finally got to see what it would have been like. He created characters that I felt interested in and wanted to learn more about. If you've ever wondered what it was like on a sailing ship- Lundy will anwser all your questions, and entertain. Again, a fantastic book!

Derek Lundy's "The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail" is in large part a history of blue-water merchant shipping in the late Nineteenth Century with a particular focus on those ships rounding Cape Horn, along with literary meditations by the author upon the works of Melville and Dana and Conrad. But interleaved with the history is Lundy's account of an imagined 1885 voyage around the Horn by his great-great-uncle Benjamin aboard the fictional 4-masted barque Beara Head. It is a harrowing, but by no means atypical voyage aboard a giant iron-hulled square-rigger of the era, its crew kept small by the owners' economies necessary to compete with steamships. This novel-within-a-history is a useful device for conveying the harsh realities of life aboard such a vessel, and Lundy is well up to the challenge of portraying ships and the sea in convincing, highly vivid detail. This will come as no surprise to readers of his earlier book, "Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters", about the 1996 Vendee Globe race.

The spark that drove Lundy to write this book is a simple (and perhaps unanswerable) question: how were his great-great-uncle and men like him able to challenge Cape Horn? Even with the strong iron hulls and wire rigging of the 1880's, Cape Horn killed men and ships with a regularity that would dismay the modern world. And if wind and wave were not enemies enough, then inadequate food, terrible living conditions, and hard-driving captains and mates would supply sufficient misery to seemingly make any rational man balk from voluntarily undertaking such a voyage. Of course, not all the seaman aboard were willing volunteers, dockside "crimps" if necessary supplied the required number of drugged and drunken men to fill the meager crew rosters permitted by penny-pinching owners. No records other than family stories and a few old letters survive to chronicle Benjamin Lundy's actual experiences or even to name the ships he sailed on, so his great-great-nephew to better understand the man and others of his ilk decided to reconstruct what his first ocean-crossing voyage might have been like, aboard a square-rigger carrying coal from England to Valpariso, Chile. Coal might seem at first thought an innocuous enough cargo, but in fact it was not. Coal, especially damp coal, often ignited by spontaneous combustion during these lengthy voyages and sometimes even exploded. Very probably quite a few of those big sailing merchantmen that mysteriously vanished at sea were victims of such slow, secret heating, deep in their black holds. Although the young Ulsterman Lundy is a veteran of the coastal trade, the challenges of working such a deep-sea merchantmen were beyond both his experience and his imagination. Derek Lundy crafted his story after intensive research that stretched to include sailing some of the same waters himself, although the author confesses a disappointed relief in not encountering a real gale off Cape Horn.

Between the fiction chapters, Lundy delves into the history of rounding Cape Horn going back to the days of Raleigh and Anson, and of the struggle against a foe even more deadly than the Cape itself: scurvy. He also explores that strange age of transition in the late Nineteenth Century when long distance bulk cargo sailing ships were still battling against the steamers that had already come to dominate shorter routes and the passenger business. Iron (and, later, steel) hulls made possible sailing vessels of a size previously unachievable, so large that even the traditional three masts of ships had to multiply in order to carry sufficient canvas. Merely increasing the size of individual masts and sails proved impractical. As masts grew taller and yards wider, the proportionately larger sails became too hard for the crews to handle. Topsails and topgallantsails were split horizontally into separate upper and lower halves with their own yards, creating the wide but shallow sails so characteristic of photographs of the big merchantmen of this time.

This combination of maritime history and nautical fiction makes for compelling, insightful reading. Lundy well conveys the misery, the fear, the fatigue, the excitement, and even the occasional exhilaration of an experience that would otherwise lie beyond the boundaries of our own lives.

The topic of covering the Globe Vendee race, the knockdowns, triumphs,rescues and death at sea is a formidable one and Derek Lundy to a degree succeeds in presenting the reader with a respectable portrayal of solo sail racing around the world's most dangerous ocean waters in the southern Antarctic seas. The book, however, moves from fantastic suspenseful portrayal of danger and rescue to the more mundane trivialities of "who's out in the lead...who's bringing up the rear...who's moving ahead" as if the reader had no idea of the outcome of the 1996-1997 Vendee-Globe race. (Maybe there are a great many readers who do not have any knowledge of the outcome of the event...but it's certainly not necessary to present this book in an anticipatory 'present tense' as if there was to be a surprise outcome). But do not despair as there is much to enjoy and learn in this book. One competitor takes up self-surgery to cut out infected parts of his arm and another competitor lashes himself to his inverted boat to await rescue in the cold Antarctic seas. The author's strongest presentation is when he delves into the minds of these solo around the world sailors. Why do they do this? And the very best story of all might have been missed by the author as the first woman to successfully complete the Globe-Vendee (Chabaud)slowly and steadily succeeds at the end of the pack. Her story needed to be told...at best she is followed by the author as he is obliged to keep the reader informed about all the boats in the race. I say read the book..but borrow it as it isn't a keeper in my library.

This a truly excellent book about sailing. Lundy knows his trade and seems to be able to sail, too. He's candid when he's got to describe his own experiences at sea, and got all my sympathy through his confessions about the old fear of capsizing and the open ocean. He wrote a detailed book about a race, probably the craziest in the world, only for people willing to risk their lives against the icebergs, but plays it all down and doesn't make you feel like you're an inferior idiot wasting your time right now, on your chair. In a very careful crescendo, he tells about the people and the ships, about designs and expectations, some technical and some poetic stuff, and you're suddenly into the South Seas, together with the mad skippers. The book reaches its highest points of drama and emotion in succession, one desaster after another, until it reaches the puzzling disappearance of Gerry Roufs, the only tragedy without redemption. Once there, Lundy doesn't stay away from the worst edges of real stories, as opposed to most novels, and deals with the sour accusations against those who maybe, only maybe could have done a little bit more for finding Roufs, instead of keep racing back to Europe. All in all, it's real good reading.

Reading "The Godforsaken Sea" is an experience in frustration. The events recounted, the Vendee Globe race of 1996, has all the requisite features to make an exciting page-turner. Instead, thanks to Derek Lundy's strange choices in narrative, we know the ending from the time we finish the first chapter! The rest of the book is an exercise in filling in the blanks interspersed with philosophical quotes cribbed from more metaphysical authors.

Equally frustrating is the complete absence of photos. Altho the book has 2 maps & a diagram of a typical Vendee Globe 60' sailboat, there are no photos at all (except 2 on the back cover)! Considering the amount of media coverage generated by this event in France, this lack is strange, to say the least. Photos are absolutely necessary in cases such as when Lundy describes his subjective reaction to viewing the latest design in racing 60' boats from the Groupe Finot workshop as compared to more traditional designs in the race. Why isn't the reader allowed to view the boats in question? He describes the way various sailors in the race appear to him; why can't we see them too? Considering the large number of sailors involved, photos of the most prominent would be a great help to the reader!

Despite these caveats, "The Godforsaken Sea" still manages to enthrall as we experience capsizes beyond the reach of land-rescue efforts, incredible heroism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, self-surgery, physical deprivations & hardships...If only a little suspense had been added to the mix, Derek Lundy would have had a best-seller!