I walked over the ground where the explosion took place. It was a dreadful sight; the dead being so mutilated that it was scarcely possible to tell their colour. I saw gun-barrels bent nearly double. I think we saw Sir Roger Sheafe, the British General, galloping across the field, by himself, a few minutes before the explosion. At all events, we saw a mounted officer, and fired at him. He galloped up to the government-house, dismounted, went in, remained a short time, and then galloped out of town.
Ned Myers (born 1793) was an American sailor. Born in Quebec as a British subject, Myers grew up in Halifax after being abandoned by his father. He moved to New York City at the age of eleven, cherishing the dream of becoming a sailor. Two years later, while serving aboard the merchant ship Sterling, Myers would meet James Fenimore Cooper, who would later write a biography of him. Myers rejected his status as a British subject and became an American citizen, something that would cause him trouble when he was captured by a Royal Navy warship in the summer of 1812. He was a survivor of the sinking of the USS Scourge (1812). However, Myers would live through the War of 1812, meeting with Cooper in 1843 for the authoring of his biography.
Quebec-born Ned Myers was a fascinating character who knew he was destined for a life on the sea from an early age. Orphaned as a young boy, Myers ran away to New York City at the tender age of 11 to fulfill his dream. On one of his voyages, Myers made the acquaintance of American author James Fenimore Cooper, who was so taken with this salty sea dog that he was compelled to write this full-length biography.
Embark on an epic journey through the life of sailor Ned Myers in James Fenimore Cooper's captivating biography. Follow Ned's thrilling adventures, from his early days at sea to shipwrecks, smuggling, and imprisonment. Cooper's vivid descriptions paint a vivid picture of life on the high seas during the 1800s, bringing to life the political, economic, and social landscape of the time.
In Coffins of the Brave: Lake Shipwrecks of the War of 1812, archaeologist Kevin J. Crisman and his fellow contributors examine sixteen different examples of 1812-era naval and commercial shipbuilding. They range from four small prewar vessels to four 16- or 20-gun brigs, three warships of much greater size, a steamboat hull converted into an armed schooner, two gunboats, and two postwar schooners. Despite their differing degrees of preservation and archaeological study, each vessel reveals something about how its creators sought the best balance of strength, durability, capacity, stability, speed, weatherliness, and seaworthiness for the anticipated naval struggle on the lakes along the US-Canadian border. The underwater archaeology reported here has guided a new approach to understanding the events of 1812–15, one that blends the evidence in contemporary documents and images with a wealth of details derived from objects lost, discarded, and otherwise left behind. This heavily illustrated volume balances scholarly findings with lively writing, interjecting the adventure of working on shipwrecks and archaeological finds into the investigation and interpretation of a war that continues to attract interest two centuries after it was fought.
With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana. In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.
