Ralph Delahaye Paine

Excerpt: "The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous...

Excerpt: "The romance of the sea! Damned rubbish, he called it. The trade of seafaring was one way to earn a living. This was about all you could say for it. He had been, lured into the merchant service as the aftermath of an enlistment in the Naval Reserve for the duration of the war. There was a great hurrah, as you will recall, over the mighty fleet of new cargo ships which were to restore the Stars and Stripes to blue water-Columbia's return to...

A great Sea Story. Excerpt: "The tall youth had no intention of waiting to be paid for his services, but he lived in an inland town and the deck of a ship was a strange and fascinating place. The Saragossa was almost ready to sail, bound out to the Spanish Main. Many passengers were on board. Among them were several tanned, robust men who looked as if they were used to hard work out-of-doors. As Goodwin lingered to watch the pleasant stir and bustle,...

Excerpt: "The task of the American Navy in the great conflict was performed exceedingly well, but so very quietly that even now the merits of the achievement are realized only by those who knew how near the German submarine campaign came to winning the war. There was no blacker period than the spring of 1917 when the losses of Allied merchant shipping were mounting toward a million tons a month, and the Admiralty was well aware that England stood...

Excerpt: ""A thick night and no mistake, Dan. It's as black as the face of a Nassau pilot. We ought to be nearing the coal wharf by now. Of course they wouldn't have sense enough to leave a light on it to give us our bearings." Captain Jim Wetherly was growling through the window of the darkened wheel-house to his deck-hand, young Dan Frazier, as the oceangoing tug Resolute felt her way up the harbor of Pensacola. She had towed a dismasted bark into...

A look at the day-to-day work of the Allied Naval Forces during the First World War, particularly in regard to the relationship between the British navy and the U.S. navy in 1918. It is partly based on the author's five months of active service with the American destroyers, and makes for some interesting reading about World War I submarines and destroyers. Ralph D. Paine was an American author of many maritime books and a friend of Stephen Crane,...