The Crew: A Portrait of Merchant Seamen at the End of the Tramp Steamer Era

This is the story of the tramp ships' seamen in the closing years of the coal burning era. It is not an adventure story with a plot; these were ordinary men, their lives rarely touched the dramatic highlights around which the plots of novels are woven. They led workaday lives far from home; in a ship's galley during a midwinter gale; stowing cable by hand; chipping, scraping and painting through the Tropics; shovelling coal closed in by the furnace glow; on solitary lookout in the graveyard watch. It follows them not only around the oceans and seaports of the world, but backwards in time to their origins and sometimes forwards to their ends. They all at some time made the tramp ship their home.