Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner - Hardcover

Nicol, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0862419921 ISBN 13: 9780862419929

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

This work renders the story of a man whom history has nearly forgotten. In his many voyages the Scottish-born sailor John Nicol twice circumnavigated the globe, visiting every inhabited continent and participating in many of the greatest events of exploration and adventure in the 18th century.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Flannery is a celebrated Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist and global warming activist. Flannery was named Australian of the Year in 2007 and is presently an adjunct professor at Macquarie University. He edited and introduced Canongate's internationally acclaimed edition of an eighteenth-century sailor's account of circumnavigating the globe (twice!), The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, published in 2000.

From Kirkus Reviews

The unaffected remembrances of an 18th-century mariner, eerie in their ability to make readers feel contiguous with the events, edited by Flannery (Throwim Way Leg, 1998, etc.). This is a remarkable memoir in that its author was neither famous nor infamous but a Common Joe who happened to attract the attention of a publisher interested in the lives of adventurers, to whom Nicol told his story. He was a sailor, though not, as Flannery puts it, ``of the rum, sodomy, and lash school.'' He was a ship's cooper and candlemaker, intimate with the below-decks world of slaves, convicts, and Chinese barbers. With a solid reputation and a widely appreciated touch for brewing spruce beer, Nicol was routinely requested to join voyages, managing to twice circumnavigate the world, engage in trade and discovery and strife, find a wife and then lose her as he fled the press gangs. Nicol had an eye and an ear for the background music of the everyday, of language (though surely tidied by Flannery for today's readers), and catches of verse and song or the work chant of West Indian slaves: ``Work away, body, bo / Work aa, jollaa.'' Equally appealing are his responses to wild landscapeshe doesn't bother with the heroic, as in this on Greenland: ``Desolation reigns around: nothing but snow, or bare rocks and ice. The cold is so intense and the weather often so thick. I feel so cheerless.'' And an immediacy rings in the account, pulling you in. ``The natives came on board in crowds and were happy to see us. They recognized Portlock and others who had been on the island before, along with Cook.'' That's Hawaii and that's Captain Cook. This memoir has seen two printings in Great Britain, one in 1822 and another in 1937, and it appears here now for the first time, the lucky find of treasure hunters who discovered a gem worth far more than its weight in gold doubloons. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0862419921
• ISBN 13: 9780862419929
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208