Category Archives: L

LAING, ALEXANDER [KINNAN] (1903-1976). Alexander Laing was the author of over twenty books of nautical fiction and history and a longtime librarian at Dartmouth College. Laing grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, entered Dartmouth in 1921, and Continue reading & text links

LANE, CARL [DANIEL] (1899-1995). Carl Lane, a nautical writer and illustrator born in New York City, developed his love for the sea while vacationing in Maine, where he eventually settled. Lane wrote The Fleet in the Forest (1943), a Great Continue reading & text links

LARCOM, LUCY (1824-1893). Lucy Larcom was a prolific and highly regarded writer of descriptive and religious verse, short fiction, and inspirational prose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born on the Massachusetts North Shore in Beverly, she lived Continue reading & text links

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LEDYARD, JOHN (1751-1789). The only American to write an account of Captain James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific Ocean, John Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut. After the death of his mariner father and the remarriage of his mother, Continue reading & text links

Thirty Years from Home, or A Voice from the Main Deck (1843) Continue reading & text links

LEGGETT, WILLIAM (1801-1839). William Leggett was a midshipman-turned-author who helped to develop the sea yarn into popular reading. In the course of his naval service, Leggett contracted yellow fever in the West Indies and suffered the persecutions of a commander Continue reading & text links

LIEBERMAN, LAURENCE [JAMES] (1935- ). Four years at the College of the Virgin Islands in the 1960s were critical years for poet Laurence Lieberman, for it was then that he discovered the Caribbean. Since those formative years, from his home Continue reading & text links

LINCOLN, JOSEPH C[ROSBY]. (1870-1944). Joseph C. Lincoln, the descendant of a long line of a seafarers, was a prolific author of best-selling verses, stories, and novels that portrayed life along the shore of Cape Cod with nostalgia and humor. The Continue reading & text links

LINDBERGH, ANNE MORROW (1906-2001). Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906 in Englewood, New Jersey. Her father, Dwight Whitney Morrow, was ambassador to Mexico when Charles Lindbergh visited Mexico City in 1928, soon after he had completed his famous solo Continue reading & text links

Life on the Ocean, or Twenty Years at Sea (1843) Continue reading & text links

LODGE, GEORGE CABOT (1873-1909). Son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and acquaintance of Edith Wharton, Henry James, and his own biographer, Henry Adams, the poet and verse dramatist George Cabot Lodge was well acquainted with the sea. Growing up in Continue reading & text links

LONDON, JACK (1876-1916). Born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco in 1876, Jack London was deserted by his father and raised in Oakland by his mother and his stepfather, whose surname he adopted. London worked at many jobs as a Continue reading & text links

LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH (1807-1882). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, at a time when that seaport was second in New England only to Boston in total tonnage engaged in maritime trade. Close to half a century later, in Continue reading & text links

LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL (1819-1891). James Russell Lowell, poet, literary and social critic, editor, abolitionist, scholar of comparative literature, Harvard professor, diplomat, and consummate traveler, frequently crossed the Atlantic to visit Britain and the Continent. On 12 July 1851, he sailed Continue reading & text links

LOWELL, ROBERT, JR [TRAILL SPENCE]. (1917-1977). Robert Lowell, the son of a naval officer, recalled in the poem, “Commander Lowell: 1887-1950” (Life Studies, 1959) how his father, in his postnaval life, would boom “Anchors Aweigh” in the bathtub and would Continue reading & text links