Acknowledgments

Many sea stories and histories of ships from many cultures went into research for this novel. However, special citation must go to W. R. Thrower’s excellent Life at Sea in the Age of Sail, John A. Garraty’s The American Nation, and the voluminous writings of Eknath Easwaran. I would also like to thank Seattle writer Mark Gray for letting me use his description of southern Illinoisan speech; novelist Richard Wiley for answering my questions about Africa; martial artist Gray Cassidy for providing me with several articles on the black fighting art, capoeira; filmmaker Art Washington for keeping me politically honest; Russell Banks for inspiration; scholar Werner Sollors of Harvard for sending me narratives of the sea; Scott Sanders for his encouragement; Gene Clyde for his books on shipbuilding; Janie Smith for her patience in typing my generally chaotic manuscript pages; Callaloo for publishing the first chapter and F3 the second, when the book was called Rutherford’s Travels; and the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant to complete the novel.

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