Excerpt: "The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous...

Tells the dramatic life-and-death tale of the Vermont native who, in April of 2008, was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores.