My new novel, The Shantyman, is now available as a Kindle ebook and will soon be available in print.  The book is based on the true story of a most unusual shantyman with a troubled past.

Many years ago, I read Frederick Pease Harlow’s memoir, The Making of a Sailor, or Sea Life Aboard a Yankee Square Rigger.  In 1870, Harlow sailed on a medium clipper to Sydney, Australia. He described the new crew coming aboard the ship: “All the crew were sober but one… The man that was drunk, was dead drunk and was hoisted out of the runner’s boat in a sling…” The drunk man’s name was Brooks, who Harlow says was a “well educated man and had been a master of ships, but his appetite for whiskey was his downfall.”

It turns out that Brooks was also a skilled shantyman, who had been trying to make his way home to the United States for years. In every port, he would start to drink and end up shanghied onto a ship bound for distant shores. In Harlow’s memoir, Brooks had finally found himself on a ship bound for New York, where he had family. He intended to give up on the liquor and start his life anew.

Harlow’s Brooks became my Jack Barlow. Barlow was a successful ship’s captain who lost his wife and true love to fever and has slipped back into heavy drink.  Now that he is on a ship bound for home, all he wants is to start over. The question is, will he get the chance?  First, he will have to help bring the ship through the ice of the Southern ocean and survive a West Indies hurricane. He may be able to save the ship and the crew, but will he be able to save himself?

I invite you to take a sea voyage that you may not soon forget with The Shantyman.