I’ve long been fascinated by the stories passed down through the generations. During my first year of marriage to Bob Elder, I embarked on a project to compile a family history including both sides of our expanded family tree. This is when I first laid eyes on a letter penned in the 1860s by my husband’s great-great-grandfather, Captain James Hamblin Jenkins. He had written it aboard a 177-foot merchant sailing ship, the Hoogly, as he traversed the vastness of the ocean writing to the woman he loved.
At the time, I thought this was the only letter that existed from Bob’s seafaring ancestor. James’ words captivated me, for he shared many qualities with the man I had married. Bob is happiest when aboard a sailboat with a fresh breeze pushing us toward a new horizon. Our first date took place aboard his 38-foot sailboat, Restless. I sailed through two pregnancies, and our daughters have grown up knowing the feel of the wind and the waves.
Over the next twenty years, I thought about James Jenkins from time to time. An oil painting of his ship sits above my husband’s desk. James’ linen-covered ship’s log occupies a space on our bookshelf. I thumbed through it, imagining his years at sea, transporting goods between New York, Singapore, London, Chile and San Francisco. The ship’s log provided the longitude, latitude and wind direction of his journeys, but told me little of his life on the sea.
After the death of my husband’s parents, the siblings came together to sort through boxes of memorabilia collected over a lifetime. To my amazement, hundreds of pages of original handwritten letters and personal journals from the Jenkins family emerged from boxes that had been stored in various homes for 150 years, ending up on the screen porch of my in-law’s house.
My brother-in-law and I took on the task of transcribing these treasures. I came to know James Jenkins, his wife, Ruth, and her younger brother, Josiah, through their own words. They pulled me in with the honesty, heartache and humor they expressed to each other. A family began to take shape.
My curiosity went into overdrive. I was hooked. I felt an overwhelming desire to breathe life into these documents and honor the story of this family. After decades of experience as a journalist, poet and nonprofit leader, I decided to write my first full-length novel.
In the early months of writing, I cast about for a framework to support the multiple voices echoing through time in the documents covering my desk. How to tie it all together? One morning, after my second cup of coffee, it hit me. Lighthouse keepers. They could be the constant in this story.
Joseph Nickerson served as first keeper of the Sandy Neck Lighthouse. As book one of Tales of the Sea opens, we see Joseph watching over the waters of Barnstable Harbor and Cape Cod Bay. Over the forty-year span of the story, Joseph and his successors anchor us to solid ground at a time of rapid change and innovation. From their tower, they watch over a now fleeting moment in history: the Great Age of Sail, when mighty wooden ships plied the world’s oceans, connecting continents and establishing trade routes.
The two-book historical fiction series, Tales of the Sea, is both a love story and an epic family saga set in a time of deep political division in the United States. Join me for the journey!