Forty Years Master

Winner, 2016 the John Lyman Book Award, sponsored by the North American Society for Oceanic History.

During Daniel O. Killman’s more than fifty years at sea, he was shipwrecked off Coos Bay, discovered gold in Alaska, was dismasted in a hurricane near Fiji, lost a rudder en route to Adelaide, had run-ins with bureaucrats, officials, and seamen, and found himself in court facing charges of murder, all the while remaining in impeccable standing with the owners of his vessels. His thrilling life at sea during the last decades of sailing ships and the emergence of steam vessels in the Pacific is chronicled in Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail and Steam.

Edited and annotated nearly forty years after Killman’s death by prominent Pacific Coast maritime historians John Lyman and Harold D. Huycke Jr., Killman’s memoir has been compiled by Rebecca Huycke Ellison from her father’s papers. Now with an introduction by maritime scholar Brian J. Rouleau and an afterword by David Hull, Killman’s rollicking narrative of storms, surly mates, bustling ports, and the business of navigating the high seas will entertain and inform scholars, students, and general readers interested in nautical and maritime history, late nineteenth–early twentieth century trade and commerce, and West Coast/trans-Pacific maritime history.