A Life On The Ocean Wave: The Journals of Captain George Bayly, 1824-1844: Introduced and edited by Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with all external stickers removed. Partial stamp on inside page. White block out sticker over stamp on title page. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Small scratch on front endpage. Dust jacket has some light creasing at edges and spine.

The journal Captain Bayly kept of his travels is notable for the historical significance of his voyages and the writer's eye for a good story. It contains eyewitness accounts of the transportation of male and female convicts to Australia, the voyage of British immigrants to the ill-fated settlement attempted by Thomas Peel near Perth, hostilities between Maoris and Europeans, and trading voyages to and from China.

Captain Bayly's stories of typhoons, floods, heroic rescues, shipboard quarrels and deaths give the book appeal to a wide audience.

The journal's depiction of the infant Australian settlements as just part of a widely-flung network of British colonial outposts in the nineteenth century also provides an insight into the nation's economic development.

Encounters with cannibals, convicts and pirates were just some highlights of eleven long journeys under sail Captain George Bayly made around the world in the early nineteenth century.