Captain Lodi Speaking

Captain Lodi Speaking (1984) by Marius Lodi Lodeesen – Argonaut Press – Good Condition

There are memoirs in which distinguished people look back upon carefully organised careers and explain how everything unfolded according to plan.

Captain Lodi Speaking does not sound as though it belongs to that category.

Written by Marius Lodi Lodeesen and published by Argonaut Press in 1984, this is the sort of wonderfully obscure maritime book that turns up from an older generation of seafarers and immediately gives the impression that its author has seen things, met people and accumulated enough stories to render an ordinary office career permanently inadequate.

As the title suggests, this is very much Captain Lodi’s turn to speak.

And once a sea captain has decided to speak, it is generally wise to let him.

The book belongs to that appealing tradition of nautical reminiscence in which ships are not merely vessels but workplaces, homes, mechanical adversaries and occasionally enormous floating sources of administrative difficulty. The sea, meanwhile, remains stubbornly uninterested in timetables, company policy, personal convenience or whether somebody has remembered to secure everything properly.

For readers accustomed to modern travel, where a delayed train may provoke an angry message on social media, books like this offer a useful reminder that earlier generations routinely crossed oceans in machines requiring crews, navigation, engineering knowledge, judgement and considerable faith that everybody else on board knew what they were doing.

The appeal is not simply ships.

It is the vanished working world surrounding them: officers, crews, ports, routines, personalities, voyages and the thousand small incidents that rarely make their way into official histories but form the actual texture of a life spent at sea.

Old maritime memoirs are particularly good at preserving people who might otherwise disappear completely from history. The engineer who could repair anything except his own temper. The officer who knew every regulation but occasionally forgot common sense. The crewman with an inexplicable talent for being exactly where trouble was about to occur. The captain who had seen the same mistake twenty times before and was increasingly unsurprised to see it again.

And somewhere above all of this stands the captain, responsible for the ship, the cargo, the crew and whatever fresh absurdity has chosen that particular voyage to make itself known.

Published by the appropriately named Argonaut Press, Captain Lodi Speaking has the pleasing air of a book produced because somebody finally decided that these memories ought to be written down before the world they described disappeared altogether.

That gives it considerable charm today.

Modern shipping may involve satellite navigation, container terminals, digital communications and enormous vessels managed with extraordinary technical sophistication, but the older maritime world retained something visibly human about it. Ships had individual characters, routes had reputations, ports had stories and captains accumulated experiences that could not easily be reduced to a spreadsheet.

This is consequently the sort of book likely to appeal as much to collectors of maritime social history as to readers interested specifically in ships. It is a personal voice from an occupation that has always generated stories simply because putting human beings into vessels and sending them across unpredictable stretches of water is an exceptionally efficient method of producing anecdotes.

This copy is in Good condition, meaning it has successfully navigated more than forty years without requiring salvage assistance, emergency towing or an inquiry by the Board of Trade.

It may show the normal signs of age and previous ownership expected of a book published in 1984, but remains a perfectly respectable reading copy and an appealing survivor from the extensive, eccentric and often overlooked world of privately and independently published maritime memoirs.

There is no ISBN, which only adds to its charm. Some books arrive with metadata, barcodes and international distribution systems. Others apparently sail into existence under their own authority and expect cataloguers to cope.

Ideal for maritime enthusiasts, collectors of seafaring memoirs, merchant shipping historians, retired sailors, lovers of obscure autobiographical books and anyone who suspects that listening to an old captain tell stories is considerably more entertaining than reading another corporate leadership manual.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where captains may speak freely, obscure maritime memoirs remain seaworthy, and nobody is required to address the proprietor as “Skipper”.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Marius Lodi Lodeesen