This book was written by the author and tells a lot about her first seventeen years of life aboard seven sailling vessels, with her father, from the age of eleven months. She wrote this as if it all happened on one ship. Here are the reasons in her own words:
HUNDREDS of people have written me asking if my book is really true. "Cradle of the Deep" is the story of my impressions of life at sea with my father on sailing ships in the South Sea Islands and Australia. When I was asked to write it I could have obtained the log books of the vessels and just copied the events word for word, but they were so dull and accurate they made me sleepy just to read them. Besides, I said to myself, the log books don't tell how I thought and felt, or what I did, so I sat myself down to write my side of the story — and I didn't want any one to fall asleep reading it either.
I made up my mind not to be as dry as a log book, but to write the human side of the story, and tell the things that happened to me that don't usually happen to other little girls. My father has given me hell for not putting in a great many incidents that he feels are important, but I wasn't thinking of anything important when I wrote it. I was truthfully tracing the memories I have of my life at sea, with very little fictitious trimming. I don't know a great many words, so I just used the few I did know to tell my story.
You see, by actual reckoning by my father I have sailed more than a hundred thousand miles on sailing ships through the South Seas, and to Australia. I have written of the sailors I remember best, using their real names. My father is exactly the character I have portrayed him, and as for me — well, if I have made myself nicer than I really am and omitted a lot of my orneryness, it is because I have always wanted to be a regular girl. I wanted to tell how it really felt to be the daughter of a sea captain, and I have done that honestly, and I didn't let a land-lubber collaborator spoil it by making my father a starchy hero and me a lacy heroine. I have read a lot of stories of people's lives, and they didn't write every detail about brushing their teeth or snoring at night or getting a stomach ache, so I didn't either ; I did write the truth about what happened during the years I was actually at sea with one or two imaginings (that were not far-fetched). It isn't romanticising to leave out dull details, but a sense of humour — and now I am ready to duck some of our former crew who are probably spitting on their hands and looking for a rope's end to give me a licking for laughing at them.
When the publishers told me to write eighty-five thousand words, I thought there weren't that many words in the world, but if other people could write them, so could I. I sat on the floor in my house pounding my typewriter, eating apples between pages, and wrote like fury, and I tore up every page that I thought was too dull. I didn't have a dictionary or a nautical encyclopaedia by my side — I just wrote from memory and from what the sailors and my father told me. I didn't know so many thousands of people were going to like my book, and I am so thrilled that they have that I'm sorry now I didn't make it miles longer, which I could have, with all the experiences I left out.
My four-masted cradle that rocked on the deep is truthfully mine, and it depicts honestly hunks, or cross sections of me and my years at sea. I put the whole story on the schooner Minnie A. Caine because that was the last ship I sailed on and I loved her the most. As a matter of log records I was on seven ships during my first seventeen years of life, and it was on the seven of them I learned to hand reef and steer, spit a curve in the wind, take lickings without squawking, cuss four minutes without repeating a word, and to live life as it came to me and not just talk about it
JOAN LOWELL.
HUNDREDS of people have written me asking if my book is really true. "Cradle of the Deep" is the story of my impressions of life at sea with my father on sailing ships in the South Sea Islands and Australia. When I was asked to write it I could have obtained the log books of the vessels and just copied the events word for word, but they were so dull and accurate they made me sleepy just to read them. Besides, I said to myself, the log books don't tell how I thought and felt, or what I did, so I sat myself down to write my side of the story — and I didn't want any one to fall asleep reading it either.
I made up my mind not to be as dry as a log book, but to write the human side of the story, and tell the things that happened to me that don't usually happen to other little girls. My father has given me hell for not putting in a great many incidents that he feels are important, but I wasn't thinking of anything important when I wrote it. I was truthfully tracing the memories I have of my life at sea, with very little fictitious trimming. I don't know a great many words, so I just used the few I did know to tell my story.
You see, by actual reckoning by my father I have sailed more than a hundred thousand miles on sailing ships through the South Seas, and to Australia. I have written of the sailors I remember best, using their real names. My father is exactly the character I have portrayed him, and as for me — well, if I have made myself nicer than I really am and omitted a lot of my orneryness, it is because I have always wanted to be a regular girl. I wanted to tell how it really felt to be the daughter of a sea captain, and I have done that honestly, and I didn't let a land-lubber collaborator spoil it by making my father a starchy hero and me a lacy heroine. I have read a lot of stories of people's lives, and they didn't write every detail about brushing their teeth or snoring at night or getting a stomach ache, so I didn't either ; I did write the truth about what happened during the years I was actually at sea with one or two imaginings (that were not far-fetched). It isn't romanticising to leave out dull details, but a sense of humour — and now I am ready to duck some of our former crew who are probably spitting on their hands and looking for a rope's end to give me a licking for laughing at them.
When the publishers told me to write eighty-five thousand words, I thought there weren't that many words in the world, but if other people could write them, so could I. I sat on the floor in my house pounding my typewriter, eating apples between pages, and wrote like fury, and I tore up every page that I thought was too dull. I didn't have a dictionary or a nautical encyclopaedia by my side — I just wrote from memory and from what the sailors and my father told me. I didn't know so many thousands of people were going to like my book, and I am so thrilled that they have that I'm sorry now I didn't make it miles longer, which I could have, with all the experiences I left out.
My four-masted cradle that rocked on the deep is truthfully mine, and it depicts honestly hunks, or cross sections of me and my years at sea. I put the whole story on the schooner Minnie A. Caine because that was the last ship I sailed on and I loved her the most. As a matter of log records I was on seven ships during my first seventeen years of life, and it was on the seven of them I learned to hand reef and steer, spit a curve in the wind, take lickings without squawking, cuss four minutes without repeating a word, and to live life as it came to me and not just talk about it
JOAN LOWELL.
