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Coasting Passage
Frederick Sturgis Laurence
Coasting Passage is a regional maritime history issued by the Bath Marine Museum—the Bath, Maine institution that in 1975 became the Maine Maritime Museum—written by Frederick Sturgis Laurence. Its subject is the coasting trade: the fleets of schooners and other small cargo vessels that once carried lumber, lime, granite, ice, and everyday goods along the New England shore, a workaday world of sail that shaped the economy of the Maine coast before railroads and engines displaced it. As a museum publication now in a second edition, it belongs to the careful, locally grounded literature that keeps such history alive. Fine details of the book are scarce today, but its value is clear for anyone interested in New England shipping, the age of working sail, or the maritime heritage of Bath and the midcoast—a small volume preserving a large and largely vanished way of life.
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The author
Frederick Sturgis Laurence is recorded as the author, though little detailed biography is readily available today. The book's authority rests less on a famous name than on its museum provenance and its close attention to a specific regional trade.
The book
Coasting Passage was published by the Bath Marine Museum in Bath, Maine, and survives in a second edition. The museum—founded in 1962 and renamed the Maine Maritime Museum in 1975—built its early publications around the shipbuilding and seafaring heritage of the Kennebec region. The book's theme is the coasting trade: the short-haul carriage of cargo under sail along the Atlantic seaboard.
How to read it
As a window onto working sail. The coasters were the trucks of their day, and their crews, cargoes, and rhythms made up much of nineteenth-century coastal life. Approach it as regional documentary history rather than as narrative epic.
For more context
Read alongside standard accounts of the New England coasting schooner and the collections of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Frederick Sturgis Laurence
- Publisher
- Bath Marine Museum
- Place of publication
- Concord, Massachusetts
- Edition
- Second edition
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Maritime
- Location
- Maine
Places