Paul A. Gilje's To Swear Like A Sailor

Nathaniel Philbrick grew up in Pennsylvania and went on to earn a BA in English from Brown University and an MA in American Literature from Duke University. ( Philbrick has worked as an editor at Sailing World Magazine during his earlier years and is the founding director of Nantucket’s Egan Maritime Institute. He is still a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. Most of Philbrick’s works relate to the sea due to his past experience, these works include: Bunker Hill, Why Read Moby Dick? , The Last Stand, Sea of Glory, In the Heart of the Sea, Away Off Shore, and Mayflower.

The Wordy Shipmates is Sarah Vowells humorous version of the Puritan’s journey to America, and the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans people became John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”. Vowell defines what it really means and what it should mean to be a “puritan nation”; America still views itself as a Puritan nation. She mentions founders of the Massachusetts bay colony to be, John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, John Cotton and others. Vowell explains how these people’s ideas contributed to the settlement of America.

In writing A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz’s goal is clear, to educate others on early America and debunk ignorant myths. Horwitz’s reason for wanting to achieve this goal is because of his own ignorance that he sees while at Plymouth Rock. “Expensively educated at a private school and university- a history major, no less!-I’d matriculated to middle age with a third grader’s grasp of early America.” Horwitz is disappointed in his own lack of knowledge of his home country, especially with his background history and decides not only to research America’s true beginnings, but to also follow the path of those who originally yearned to discover America.

Piracy, buccaneering and privateering are commonly confused with each other in media and literature. In this paper, all three will be evaluated separately on their impact on the Spanish and North American colonies in North America. This requires an explanation of the distinction between all three. Although very similar, these practices do hold some differences ; while piracy was the practice of illegally attacking and robbing ships at sea, privateering was privately-owned armed ships (usually pirates) that were issued a government commission and authorized for the use of war. Buccaneers were actually runaway sailors and deserters who arrived to the waters of the Caribbean Sea, where they kept themselves alive by roasting stolen cattle on makeshift

In Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere is torn between the desires of personal, moral convictions and the letter of the law. Vere’s difficulties are represented by the decision to hang Billy or forgive him. Furthermore, Melville utilizes various biblical allusions and examples from history to promote his ideology through the character of Captain Vere. Melville introduces the historical background of the story before proceeding to describe life on the Bellipotent.

In the midst of it all, buccaneers and privateers are generally known as what they are, pirates. But, this hackneyed term is slightly ambiguous. What most people don’t know is that these three hundred year old beings appeared in different situations throughout the Golden Age of Piracy. Many of the pirates from this period lived in separate parts of the world, executing different assignments for different reasons. Although buccaneers and privateers were, in essence, pirates, they were inequivalent in terms of background, purpose, and operation.

I learned about baseball as I sat between my great-grandfather and grandfather during holidays and summer picnics. If we were in the park, my uncles and cousins picked an area for the ball field. If we were at the farm, an empty pasture would suffice. As I grew, I became the runner for the older uncles, who weren’t fast anymore. Thus, I learned to play baseball under the guidance of my uncles and cousins.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age explores the social, political, and cultural history of pirates during the Golden Age of Atlantic piracy. Rediker is a prize-winning historian and a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. The purpose of Villains of All Nations is to provide a new outlook on the history of piracy during the Golden Age of piracy while also highlighting how pirates created an egalitarian society.

Eras Book Reporting Form AP English Language and Composition Name: Hadley Cabitto Date: October 26, 2015 Period: 5 Book Title: The Wordy Shipmates Genre: Non-Fiction Original Publication Date: October 7, 2008 Your Edition’s Publication Date: 2008 Author: Sarah Vowell Number of Pages: 250 Brief Summary and Arrangement of the Book: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell is a telling of the Puritans during the 17th and 18th centuries. She uses witty one liners and immense sarcasm to explain the division between groups of Puritans. She also uses examples from important documents and events to illustrate the contrast in the groups reactions.

In Herman Melville’s iconic work, Moby Dick, Ishmael tells of how he always goes sailing as a “simple sailor.” This blatant example of litotes is used to bring Ishmael’s personality into contrast with the picture the narrator has portrayed himself as fitting in. Ishmael portrays himself as a simple-minded sailor looking for fresh air, exercise, to not be in the spotlight, and to make money. While telling of his role on a sailing voyage, the character Ishmael is seen to have been written with many techniques to give the reader a sense that the character is not quite as simple as first seen. Through Melville’s use of academic satire, learned vocabulary, and far-reaching historical and mythological knowledge, the idea of Ishmael being a purely

Forth, Williams references a boat of religious people trying to obtain religious freedom, he took a boat full of religious people trying to obtain religious freedom to get to the colonies, a connection made on digitalcrowsnest.wordpress.com. Or maybe he while in school he the great philosophers and is calling out Plato’s analogy for society, “‘Suppose the following to be the state of affairs on board ship

After reading The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, I have concluded that the book kept my attention throughout, but I believe it could have improved. The storyline is scattered among many different stories, all centered around the meteorological nightmare of October of 1991. The setting, time, and place quickly change from story to story as most end in human lives being slain by the storm. I believe the movie is structured better, as it is centered around only one story, the story of a Gloucester, Massachusetts fishing crew on the Andrea Gail. I do not think the author had the experience of these men, whom he wrote about to remember and respect.

Bradford’s uncomplicated diction emphasizes the puritan plain style of writing in the 1700s with concise sentence and simple vocabulary, “Two of these seven were Mr. William Brewster, their reverend Elder, and Myles Standish, the captain and military commander, unto whom myself and many others were much beholden in our low and sick condition”. (Bradford )Smith’s contrasting diction expresses a sophisticated account with brash vocabulary, “Then finding the Captain, as is said, that used the savage that was his guide as his shield, all the rest would not come near him.” (Smith) The native were

The Conflict Between Individuality and Society: An Analysis of Ambiguous Morality in Billy Budd, Sailor Capital punishment and mandatory military service, two major political issues that are still debated to this day. Both, at their core, boil down to one question. Are the rights of an individual worth less than the survival of a society? Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor follows Billy Budd, a young and naïve sailor during his impressment aboard the Bellipotent, a British warship manned by Captain Vere, during the Napoleonic Wars. Billy Budd is taken from the aptly named merchant ship the Rights-of-Man and dropped into the brutal reality of life in the British Navy.

While there, Melville’s family also told him stories of his two cousins Thomas Melville and Guert Gansevoort pertaining to their lives at sea, as well as from his own father’s life on ships, perhaps sparking his own desire to travel. Melville’s early 20s consisted of both worry for not being able to increase his family’s income and guilt for not being able to plant himself in a career or job. Melville eventually fabricated the idea that he would try life at sea, perhaps influenced by both the pressure of society and the stories that his family told him pertaining to seamen. After these stimuli, Melville boarded his first ship, the St. Lawrence, which left him with a longing feeling for the rigging life to which he occupied by signing on as a common seaman aboard the Acushnet in 1843. The Acushnet’s first harbor was at Nuku Hiva, located in the South Seas (Steffof 7, 13-14, 29).