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Reference expertise, love of ships spawn unique encyclopedia
By Jerry Harkavy, Associated Press writer
The sea stories that gave rise to Hollywood's biggest potential blockbusters of the season -- "Amistad" and "Titanic" -- have their rightful places in Lincoln P. Paine's new book.
But the 1839 slave ship mutiny and the luxury liner's deadly encounter with an iceberg in 1912 are just two of the hundreds of sagas Paine came across during the three years he spent researching and writing "Ships of the World," (Houghton Mifflin, $50).
And plenty of those could be fodder for silver screen epics.
"If you want 1,000 good stories, here they are," said Paine, a 38-year-old writer and editor whose 680-page encyclopedia draws from both his career in reference publishing and his lifelong love of ships.
The handsomely illustrated book contains alphabetical listings for historically important ships such as the Mayflower and the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, as well as for ships whose significance lies in their technology or in their reflections of social history.
The entries are as ancient as the Cheops ship, unearthed during a 1954 excavation at Egypt's Great Pyramid and believed to date back to 2500 B.C., and as recent as Thursday's Child, the racing sloop whose 1988 voyage from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn shattered the longstanding speed record set by the clipper ship Flying Cloud.
They range in size from Tinkerbelle, the 13-foot wooden day sailer in which Robert Manry crossed the Atlantic in 78 days in 1965, to the 1,095-foot supertanker Amoco Cadiz, which ran aground and broke up along the French coast in 1978, spilling an estimated 223,000 tons of oil.
The Amistad and the Titanic were not the only ships whose stories inspired movies. Among the others was the British gunboat Amethyst, whose thrilling escape down the Yangtze River during the Chinese civil war in 1949 was the basis for the film "Yangtze Incident." On the lighter side, the tale of islanders from Scotland's Outer Hebrides who seized cases of whiskey from the wreckage of the cargo ship Politician after it ran aground in 1941 inspired "Tight Little Island."
Some ships in Paine's encyclopedia gave rise to songs. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" recalls the ore carrier that went down in a storm on Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members. The USS Reuben James, a destroyer sunk by a German U-boat more than a month before America's entry into World War II, is also remembered in music and lyrics.
Nearly half the entries are naval vessels, from the ancient Greek triremes exemplified by the 1987 replica Olympias to the guided missile frigate USS Stark, which was damaged by an Iraqi missile in the Persian Gulf in 1987. Ships of exploration and discovery are also heavily represented, as are ships whose sinkings, shipwrecks or other misfortunes were their chief claims to fame.
The exploratory voyages are the stories Paine likes best, particularly those in the Pacific. He was less fond of his work involving naval battles, a depressing task due to the carnage and high body counts.
Paine said his book fills a void by providing in a single volume a wealth of information that a reader might otherwise have to cull from many sources.
"There are volumes on the world's capital ships, German commerce raiders of World War I, PT boats, British tea clippers, British wool clippers, coolie ships, American clippers, American Down Easters," he said, pointing to the shelves lining the study of his home overlooking Casco Bay. "It's all so specialized."
If the book has a flaw, he said, it's the overwhelming focus on ships from modern European and other Western cultures that disregards the rich seafaring heritage in such regions as the Indian Ocean. But he was limited by the paucity of books and other sources with information about specific ships.
By background and avocation, Paine was well suited for the ambitious project he began in his spare time while working in New York as a senior editor for Facts on File.
There is his enduring fascination with ships, which he traces to his childhood visits to New York's South Street Seaport, the summers he spent day sailing on Long Island Sound and off Nantucket, and his work organizing flotillas of tall ships for Operation Sail.
Paine's two daughters bear middle names of ships that appear in his book: Kalulaini, the three-masted square rigger that was the last commercial ship of its kind to sail under the U.S. flag, and Duguay, the French warship of the Napoleonic era that was captured by the British, who renamed it HMS Implacable.
After graduating from Columbia University, Paine began a 15-year career in publishing, working his way up from proofreader to senior editor. In the process, he honed his skills in researching and disseminating information.
For about a year and a half, Paine worked on "Ships of the World" from 9 p.m., to the wee hours of the morning, trying at the same time to balance the demands of a full-time job and spend time with his wife and daughters. He eventually quit his job to devote all his working hours to the book, spending much of the time in New York libraries compiling data.
Paine, his wife Allison and their daughters moved to Portland, Maine, a year ago, to a stately old home with a panoramic view of the island-dotted waters to their north and east. His next project is a maritime history aimed at young adult readers.
From the second-floor study where he works, Paine is often drawn to the daily procession of fuel barges, pleasure craft, lobster boats and work ferries he can see from his window.
"It's a never ending source of entertainment when I'm supposed to be doing something else," he said. "But it does keep my mind focused on boats."
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Photo by The Associated Press Author Lincoln P. Paine of Portland, Maine, has compiled a new book, "Ships of the World," which contains "1,000 good stories" on the subject, he says. |  |
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