Seaward: Chasing Master Mariners in the Golden Age of Sail

Harold Bradley learned early in life, through family lore, that one of his great-great granduncles was an Irish sea captain. Sadly, the family lore was scanty. All it offered was a name, William Kelly, and two intriguing, albumin photographic prints—one of a large man squeezed into an ornate Victorian armchair; another of the same man, just head and shoulders, his penetrating gaze fixed on a distant point. Bradley couldn’t help but wonder: Where did Captain Kelly go and what did he do in the so-called golden age of sail?

After much determined sleuthing through historic newspapers, crew lists, ship logs, and other records including a shipboard passenger diary, the end result is SEAWARD, part biographical and historical memoir, part detective story. The book casts new light on Great Britain’s 19th-century merchant navy—especially as the master mariners of one Irish family experienced this incomparable career. William Kelly (along with his younger brother, John) left wakes to trace and history to plumb, from Belfast and Liverpool to the Americas, British Guiana, Peru, India, Australia, and China. Their ships carried people with high hopes to far-flung destinations, while also moving agricultural produce and manufactured products around the world.

Readers of SEAWARD will come away with a better understanding of 19th-century commercial seafaring as a business, along with a greater appreciation of the transgenerational connections that bind us to our ancestors.

The ships are sailing. Let the stories begin
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“Deftly marshalling an amazing range of historical records from around the world, SEAWARD chronicles the lives of two brothers who were brought up in a public house on the edge of Antrim Town. Their subsequent careers as master mariners intersected with the glories of the Victorian age of sail but also with some of its more controversial episodes.”
Robert H. Foy, author of Dear Uncle: Immigrant Letters to Antrim from the USA, 1843–1852 and Remembering All the Orrs: The Story of the Orr Families of Antrim and Their Involvement in the 1798 Rebellion.

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Harold Bradley now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he has worked as a writer in the telecommunications, aerospace, industrial safety systems, energy, and scientific software industries. He is a seasoned family historian with two generations of nineteenth-century master mariners in his family tree. With the publication of Seaward, he has moved from writing in industry to reimagining his family's first generation of wind-jamming seafarers.