Rare book. Vintage. HB. 395pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.
Our imagination and physical being constantly go down to the sea for restoration, challenge, and the recovery of primeval memories.
In this new treasury of prose and poetry, Ludovic Kennedy captures, in the words of intrepid voyagers and courageous survivors, the many moods and faces of the vast deep.
From Hart Crane to Winston Churchill, from two views of Captain Bligh to Commodore Perry's opening of Japan, man's endurance and the ocean's sway is celebrated.
Sea Journeys includes the legendary voyages of exploration and discovery recounted by Salazar and Vaz de Caminha, as well as the later voyages of self-discovery as reflected in the memoirs, stories, and letters of such voyagers as Anna Brassey and Sophia Taylor, Stephen Crane and Somerset Maugham.
The terror and savagery of the sea is awesomely portrayed by those who made fantastic voyages in small and open boats.
Then there are the magical days of the great steamships and ocean liners, from that Leviathan known as The Great Eastern to the eternally fascinating, doomed Titanic -- and the stories of those who sailed aboard and those who survived.
Some of the finest writing about man's centuries on the sea comes, as a delightful surprise, from unknown seafarers. Keeping them in goodly company are: Sylvia Plath, Noel Coward, Rudyard Kipling, Melville and Dickens, Masefield and Poe, Conrad and Verne, Waugh and Auden, and many, many others singing the endless song of the sea.
About the author
Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, and author. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Strathclyde in 1985 and also held similar posts at the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling. He was knighted in 1994 for services to journalism.
He was a member of the crew of the British destroyer HMS Tartar that took part in the pursuit and destruction of the German battleship Bismarck in May of 1941. 'Sub-Lieutenant' (1942) told of his naval experiences and 'Pursuit' (1974) told of the sinking of the Bismarck.
He undertook many campaigns on behalf of people who had been wrongly convicted of murder, including Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans and also wrote an account of the trial of Stephen Ward following the Profumo affair. He also wrote an account of the murders at Ten Rillington Place.
He married actress Moira Shearer (1926-2006) on 25 February 1950 and the couple had four children.
He died of pneumonia at Salisbury, Wiltshire on 18 October 2009.
