{"id":58,"date":"2012-02-09T19:47:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T19:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sealitsearchable\/?p=58"},"modified":"2022-07-09T17:31:14","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T17:31:14","slug":"ames-nathaniel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/a\/ames-nathaniel\/","title":{"rendered":"Ames, Nathaniel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nathaniel<\/a>by Hugh Egan<\/em> (2000)<\/p>\n

AMES, NATHANIEL (1805-1835). Son of the Federalist statesman Fisher Ames and grandson of a famous colonial almanac publisher, Nathaniel Ames was a blueblood who went to sea and later wrote about it. In this way he served as a literary forerunner of Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and others. Like Dana, Ames went from Harvard University to the forecastle; he wrote humorously of how he preferred the “seminary” of a man-of-war to Harvard and how his status as a self-sufficient able seaman was superior to the occupation of authorship. As had Melville in his early novels, Ames combined a genteel, picaresque style with trenchant analyses of foreign missionaries and the inhumane treatment of sailors. He is best known for his nonfiction A Mariner’s Sketches<\/em> (1830) and Nautical Reminiscences <\/em>(1832), which recount his experiences in naval and merchant vessels across the globe. Written in a casual, almost offhand manner but with an eye toward startling and realistic detail, these works were among the first to depict the everyday rhythms of a sailor’s existence, its tedium, and its danger. Ames notes in passing, for instance, how a man swimming between vessels is consumed by sharks. His descriptions of landscape and harbor often attain a pictorial eloquence. Impatient with romantic renderings of sea life, Ames was a particularly bitter critic of James Fenimore Cooper’s early sea novels. In A Mariner’s Sketches<\/em> he claims to have read Cooper’s The Pilot<\/em> (1823) out loud to the crew of a naval vessel and records their disgust with it. In Nautical Reminiscences<\/em>, he ridicules the “nonsensical gibberish” spoken by Cooper’s sailors but claims nothing better can be expected from an author who “came in at the cabin windows” (25).<\/p>\n

Ames wrote fictional tales of the sea as well, collected in An Old Sailor’s Yarns<\/em> (1835); many of these are concerned with the love of a sailor for a beautiful woman. Genteel and whimsical, they are very much in the tradition of Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book<\/em>. In the novella-length Morton<\/em>, Ames pairs the first mate of an American whaler with the niece of a Spanish governor. In this story of love, battle, imprisonment, and disguise, romantic stratagems are wittily compared to tactics at sea. Together with William Leggett, Ames helped build a tradition of popular, sentimental sea tales that found their way into East Coast literary’ magazines during the 1830s.<\/p>\n

Ames’ reputation, however, rests upon his autobiographical writings, especially A Mariner’s Sketches<\/em>, which provided fellow sailor-authors with a model for conveying the unvarnished realities of sea life. Dana mentions this book on the first page of Two Years before the Mast<\/em> (1840) as the only previous work in which nautical life is presented from a sailor’s point of view. A Mariner’s Sketches<\/em> also served as a sourcebook for Melville as he wrote his novel White-Jacket<\/em> (1850). Melville borrowed a number of details from Ames, most importantly a description of a fall overboard that serves as the climax of White-Jacket<\/em>. Ames’ work helped to initiate a major shift in American sea literature from Cooper’s romantic novels, to more factual accounts told from the point of view of the common sailor. <\/p>\n

A Mariner’s Sketches<\/em> (1830)<\/p>\n

Google Books<\/a>
\nHathiTrust<\/a><\/p>\n

Nautical Reminiscences<\/em> (1832)<\/p>\n

Google Books<\/a>
\nHathiTrust<\/a><\/p>\n

An Old Sailor\u2019s Yarns <\/em>(1835)<\/p>\n

ReadCentral<\/a>
\nHathiTrust<\/a><\/p>\n

keywords: white, male<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Hugh Egan (2000) AMES, NATHANIEL (1805-1835). Son of the Federalist statesman Fisher Ames and grandson of a famous colonial almanac publisher, Nathaniel Ames was a blueblood who went to sea and later wrote about it. In this way he Continue reading &<\/span> text links<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":498,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25913],"tags":[53755,53761,53762,53779,53777,53764],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a","tag-19th-century","tag-fiction","tag-first-person-narrative","tag-merchant-marine","tag-navy-coast-guard","tag-nonfiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/498"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6660,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/6660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}