Maritime Historical Fiction

by Cian T. McMahon

|

5 books

As a professional historian, I have built a career on using primary sources to tell the truth about the past. But that does not mean that I do not enjoy a good yarn! At its best, historical fiction tells made-up stories using the nuts and bolts of honest, historical research to tell us something new about the human condition. After writing The Coffin Ship, a book about the lived experience of emigration during the Great Irish Famine, I found myself drawn to historical fiction set on sailing ships at sea. Here are five of my favorites.

Read more... Read less...

The North Water

Ian McGuire, 2016

The North Water tells the story of the Volunteer, a doomed whaling ship hunting in the Arctic Circle in the nineteenth century. At first glance, it seems as if the story is about Drax, a salty old harpooner with a penchant for liquor and violence. As the voyage develops, however, one realizes that it is actually Sumner, the ship’s disgraced ex-army surgeon, whose fate we fear for. McGuire’s pinpoint accurate description of life on a whaling ship, including gory descriptions of how the sailors gleaned the oil from the dead animals, is a gripping whodunnit even though, all along, we know exactly who did it.

The Wager

A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

David Grann, 2023

Fans of true-crime might recognize the name of David Grann, who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, the book on which Martin Scorsese’s 2023 movie was based. In The Wager, Grann investigates another famous story of murder and intrigue, this time on the eighteenth-century high seas. The Wager originally left England in 1740 on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon and its priceless treasures. When the ship was wrecked on a remote island off the coast of South America, however, its survivors turned on each other in a bid to survive. Although not technically a work of fiction, The Wager reads like a novel.

The Surfacing

Cormac James, 2015

Looking back, I have to admit that my reaction to this book was probably shaped as much by the fact that I am a father, as it was by the fact that I am an historian. It follows the trials and travails of Lieutenant Morgan and his crew, who are committed to tracking down Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition. Lost in the frozen wilderness, Morgan’s will to survive is tempered by the fact that a stowaway will soon give birth to a child on board the ship. Much of the action occurs in the tiny, wooden apartments in the belly of the ship, which only adds to the sense of claustrophobia and longing.

Star of the Sea

Joseph O'Connor, 2004

I am probably partial to this book, in part, because it offers a fictionalized account of the kinds of voyages I wrote about in The Coffin Ship. Set in 1847, the darkest year of Ireland’s Great Famine, it tracks how a wide range of characters—from the upper-class Lord Merridith to the journalist Grantley Dixon to the servant Mary Duane—struggle and strive to leave behind their tangled pasts. As someone who has spent a lot of time analyzing eye-witness accounts of emigrants, sailors, and captains, I really enjoyed the variety of (fictionalized) primary sources that Joseph O’Connor employs to tell his story.

In the Heart of the Sea

The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

Nathaniel Philbrick, 2001

This is another work of non-fiction that reads like an imaginative novel. It tells the story of the Essex, the early nineteenth-century whaling ship from Nantucket that ended up getting rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the South Pacific. If the story sounds familiar, it is because it is: Herman Melville used this tale as inspiration for his 1851 instant classic, Moby-Dick. The power of Philbrick’s account lies not only in his gripping account of the Essex’s misadventures but also in his detailed, sympathetic description of what it was like to be a whaler in the early 1800s.