Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships W. H. Bunting Hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-88448-315-1 7 x 10, 512 pages, photographs Published with Maine Maritime Museum, www.bathmaine.com Maritime History / Maine

"Live Yankees is an important book for the understanding of the last days of working sail in the American Merchant Marine. Easily readable, it makes what could be a tedious tome of business operations into an enjoyable and understandable adventure. If more historians wrote in such a lively manner, the discipline would enjoy much greater interest in the minds of the public. Live Yankees is a must for those who want to learn more about the Sewall family, the building and operations of their vessels, and about Bath, Maine."
—International Journal of Maritime History

". . . an exciting story of maritime capitalists who created a shipbuilding and ship-owning empire, and who sought every opportunity to make money and used every advantage, trick, and loophole to keep it . . . . This is outstanding Maine history well told."
—Times Record

". . . a gem of a book. While it's a compilation of numerous stories, letters, and accounts of one of the most influential shipping families (and shipping towns) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bunting's arrangement and interpretation of this material results in a color tapestry of the realities of nineteenth-century American maritime commerce and society . . . . Bunting's charge was to create a story that was 'both readable and able to withstand scholarly scrutiny.' He has succeeded."
—WoodenBoat Magazine

"Other books have been written about the Sewalls and their maritime empire, but W. H. Bunting's Live Yankees is unprecedented in both sweep and forthrightness. It's a century-long drama set at a time when ships were built, loaded, and manipulated by hand, when the human resource department bore brass-knuckles and clubs, and residents of a small midcoast town were intimately connected to ports and islands on the opposite side of the world . . . . The result is a thoroughly enjoyable, full-body immersion into the late, great age of sail."
—Down East Magazine

"Some books, like some ships, are produced to be functional, to carry freight as it were. Others are written with an eye to form, to move with grace and speed to the delight of all concerned. W. H. Bunting's latest volume . . . satisfies almost perfectly on both counts . . . . This is a lively, honest account that comes very close to bringing things to life."
—Maine Sunday Telegram

"This stunning voyage through a century of maritime globalization welds sailing-ship seafaring, building, and owning into a sumptuous exploration of the Maine-coast capitalism, modernization, and determination which kept great sailing vessels afloat and profitable far into the steamship era."
—John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University

For nearly a century members of the Sewall family built and managed a fleet of more than one hundred merchant vessels, mostly stout deepwater square-riggers. No family has been more intimately associated with the history of the city of Bath, then among the most productive shipbuilding communities of any size in the world. Despite a veneer of old-fashioned formalized civility, international shipping in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a highly competitive, low-margin, and often cut-throat business. While the Sewalls' shrewd responses to market changes make a fascinating story, the surviving correspondence from their captains offers adventure of another kind. Sewall captains were required to make regular reports to the Sewall office, and this correspondence is a treasure-trove of stories about the voyages of Sewall ships-surly crews, mutinies, plagues, shipwrecks, "cannibal isles," destitute widows, and more, along with details of ship performance, weather encountered, trouble in port, and even lawsuits. The Sewalls also invested in railroads and other non-maritime securities and speculations, and also became involved in politics, but it is in the maritime world that they are best remembered. As the owners of the last surviving important fleet of American square-riggers engaged in worldwide trade, it was the Sewalls' fate to draw the curtain on this economic enterprise. No family had worked more assiduously, more stubbornly, or with more enterprise to delay the arrival of that day.

W. H. Bunting is the author of Portrait of a Port: Boston 1852-1914; Steamers, Schooners, Cutters, and Sloops; A Day's Work: A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860-1920 in two volumes; Sea Struck; and The Camera's Coast. With Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., he was co-author of An Eye for the Coast: The Maritime and Monhegan Island Photographs of Eric Hudson. He lives in Whitefield, Maine.