Fifty Five Years at Sea

Book excerpt: Fifty Five Years at Sea is the story of the author's great-great-grandfather, Captain William Sewall Nickels ((1836-1920). For fifty-five years, he had no fixed address. He was one of the hundreds of nineteenth century master mariners from Prospect, now Searsport, Maine. Captain Nickels spent fifty-five years of his life on merchant sailing vessels, forty-five of them as commander. His wife followed him to sea, and his daughters were raised on his ships.In words and pictures, it covers seven generations of Captain Nickels' family from the time his great-grandparents first settled on the shores of Penobscot Bay, before the American Revolution. It follows his early years on a farm in Prospect (now Searsport), Maine; his fifty-five years as a merchant mariner; his retirement to Sailors' Snug Harbor in Staten Island, New York; the fates of his children and grandchildren, and the births of his great-grandchildren in the years before his death. It is a memorial to a simple man, an uncelebrated mariner, who lived long, worked hard, loved deeply, and spent fifty-five years at sea.