A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the journals of Captain George Bayly 1824–1844
Miegunyah Press, $49.95 hb, 364 pp
A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the journals of Captain George Bayly 1824–1844 edited by Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson
A white-haired, white-bearded Captain George Bayly peers benignly out at us from the 1885 photograph frontispiece of A Life on the Ocean Wave. With epaulettes to his black uniform jacket, braided sleeves, a sword at his side and a ceremonial captain’s head-piece on the table beside him, Bayly looks the quintessential retired man of the sea. He looks like a man Charles Dickens should have been describing. We should be meeting him in some sea-side parlour, in some sailortown tea-palace. He looks as if he has a story to tell.
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