I have been living in the age of Napoleon, sailing ships, and the War of 1812. I have been re-reading the Aubrey/Maturin series of books by Patrick O’Brian, and I find that I stay up half the night on a regular basis. A warm bed and a good reading lamp are so conducive to satisfying reading. If I had a chair-and-a-half from Pottery Barn, I fear I’d never blog again.
Now I find that there is a biography of Patrick O’Brian that somehow I missed. I see many late nights in my immediate future.
I grew up by the sea. My father was a Captain in the Navy and I grew up reading the Naval Institute Proceedings and persuading my father to order prints of sailing ships for me to hang on my wall. And even though I know precious little about sailing vessels, they have taken possession of my soul once again.
I keep meaning to google to find out exactly what oakum is. It’s mentioned in connection with sailing ships and it was used to fill the cracks on the log cabin built in “Alone in the Wilderness” on PBS. So there is a “Little House” connection of sorts… I looked it up: oakum is “loose hemp or jute fiber, sometimes treated with tar, creosote, or asphalt, used chiefly for caulking seams in wooden ships and packing pipe joints.”
Or filling the cracks between cabin logs.
