Children at Sea: Lives Shaped by the Waves
Children at Sea is a collection of eight biographies of men and women who spent at least part of their childhood at sea. They are selected to illustrate different aspects of maritime history, such as the slave trade, convict transports and migrant ships. The author makes a virtue of giving each person a full-life biography, although this means that the seaborne part is often overshadowed by the later life. For instance, Joseph Emidy, who went from being a plantation slave in Brazil to become a concert musician in England, never spoke about his journey from Africa as a child, so this has to be conjectured from other accounts. Likewise, the chapter on the foundling children sent overseas in immigrant ships is largely about their experience after they landed.
These are all interesting case studies, most of them monuments to the resilience of the human spirit even among the most helpless. They remind us that maritime history is not only about sailormen.
