Bücher von Carl Anderson

In the summer of 1850 Benjamin Eastman, a sixteen-year old boy from New York City, is asked by his clergyman father to deliver a bundle of books to cousins in St. Petersburg, Russia. It will be his first time away from home. He boards the sailing vessel Chicora in Boston, and on his first day at sea he opens a letter from his mother in which are her prayers and hopes for her eldest son?s safe return. Benjamin records the details of the voyage in a journal, which includes the ship?s daily positions and weather. As the ship enters European waters there is much to see? islands, headlands, castles, ships of all descriptions, and lighthouses. Finally, Benjamin encounters the bewildering formalities faced by foreigners entering Imperial Russia. The book includes a letter Benjamin Eastman wrote in 1856 to his younger brother in New York. In it he describes a voyage in the ship Nazarene in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In June 1796 a 17-year old Anglo-Irish youth, Jonathan Henry Lovett, was appointed a junior clerk with the British East India Company. With Britain at war with France, Lovett sailed from England to India aboard the East Indiaman Malabar. It took the ship seven months to reach Bombay, where Lovett disembarked in January 1797. Lovett kept a journal during the voyage in which he recorded his observations of seabirds, fish, and marine life seen from the quarterdeck of the Malabar. During a stopover at the Cape of Good Hope he described its rugged mountains, exotic wildlife, its Dutch and native inhabitants, British military encampments, and ships coming and going. Originally written in two volumes recently discovered in libraries 7,000 miles apart, the complete Jonathan Lovett journal comes together here for the first time in living memory. Excerpts from the Malabar's logbook and detailed maps add additional detail to this tale of travel by sea in the days of the East Indiamen.