Review
"We are now anchored off Pauliac, and have the last few days passed through scenes of peril," wrote 17-year-old Sarah Jane Girdler in her journal, "which I hope will never be my lot to witness again, and which will never be forgotten." One of Sarah's descendants has made certain that not only those scenes of peril in the Bay of Biscay will be remembered, but that each of her days aboard the clipper ship Robert H. Dixey on its voyage from Boston to Mobile, Alabama, where it picked up cotton cargo, to Crondstadt and Petersburg in Russia, and various countries in Europe from January 1857 to December 1858 is to be preserved in a book published within three years of the new millennium. Mr. Girdler, a descendent of Richard W. Dixey's captain and a tanker commander during WWII, goes further. He constructs a rich context for Sarah's journal entries. Having described contrasts between Marblehead, Mass. where it was built, and Mobile, Alab. and sketched the background of the people associated with the Dixey, Girdler describes the building of the ship, facets of life on board, activities in port, and her early voyages, starting in 1855. Having revived the heartbeat of Sarah's journal, Girdler narrates the end of the Dixey. The clipper was built to fulfill a dream, but after only five years of distinguished service, it foundered in Mobile Bay. With a Victorian novelist's sense of what readers of such a chronicle-embedded journal would crave, Girdler tells in an epilogue how all the personages fared in later life. A genealogy graphs relationships, including his own. A slew of Dixey letters and Sarah's own letters round out the prose enhancements of the journal. But genuine charm as a quality of the book, with its clipper-like trim-size, derives also from the photographs, drawings, maps, and documents. Acts of ancestor piety run risks few practitioners survive. Girdler is one of those few. Most readers will not feel that he is simply insisting that we embrace his fascination and pride as our own. He gives this venture a life of its own, and we smell the salt sea air or we don't. I did. -- From Independent Publisher
