Publisher's Synopsis
Captain Peter J Lawrence embarked early on his nautical career. Barely in his twenties when he graduated from Massachusetts Maritime Academy and got his first post as third mate on a cargo-passenger ship bound for East Africa in 1963, he lived aboard at sea for the majority of the coming years as he advanced in rank and took his exams to qualify as a ship's master. At 28 he got his first post as ship's master on a cargo-passenger ship route from the US to the Mediterranean.
In this sprawling memoir that covers his two decades at sea and another twenty-some years at a desk running a busy shipping company, Captain Lawrence shares observations and notes on maritime protocols and lore, geography, and history acquired in far-flung travels at ports ranging from Northern Europe to the eastern coast of South America, from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal to India, from Japan to Korea to Hong Kong, and from West Africa to Australia.
Facing two monster storms approaching from different directions in the Pacific, en route to Japan, Captain Lawrence describes one of the most intense of his many encounters with wild weather at sea. The storms won the first round, knocking tons of cargo overboard in what was, at the time, the largest loss of cargo at sea, but Captain Lawrence got the upper hand and brought the ship, crew, passengers, and remaining cargo safely to port in Yokohama, Japan.
When he was through captaining massive cargo ships full of, originally, entirely break-bulk cargo, loaded and stored meticulously by hand labor in the massive holds below decks, Captain Lawrence transitioned to a post on land. From his post at the desk of a new shipping company come stories of twenty years helping to oversee the US military's pre-positioning force at sea. In the memoir's final chapter, Captain Lawrence recalls many years of private travel, post-retirement, in the company of his wife and traveling companion, Mary Ellen
