If the Sea Must Be Your Home: The Journey Begins

Welcome to the first in a series of articles about my recently completed historical novel, If the Sea Must Be Your Home. This inaugural post reveals the project's origin. In the articles which follow, you'll glimpse the original handwritten documents from the mid-1800s which inspired the novel and travel back in time with me to a time when the written word was a lifeline tying families together.

I'm currently shopping for a literary agent. I welcome inquiries at cynthia@cynthiaelder.com.

I know what it means to love a sailor. My first date with my husband, Bob Elder, took place aboard a 38-foot Ericson sloop on the waters of Penobscot Bay in Maine. That date lasted a week. While some women go to the salon or buy a new dress for their first date, I found my way to a West Marine store in Orlando, Florida, where I lived and worked at the time.

“I think I need rain gear and topsiders,” I told the salesman. I flew up to Boston and Bob spirited me up the coast to the town of Camden, Maine. Here, the story of my family’s life began. I sailed through two pregnancies. Both of our daughters experienced life aboard a sailboat from their earliest weeks and months of life. Sailing is in our blood.

I have long been fascinated by family history. Through my twenties and thirties, I compiled several anecdotal history books, where I invited relatives far and near to contribute their own stories, poems, and historic documents long held in boxes, trunks, and drawers, far from view.

While compiling one of these histories during the first year of our marriage, I laid eyes on a transcription of a letter penned in the 1860s by my husband’s great-great-grandfather, James Hamblin Jenkins. He had written it aboard a 190-foot merchant sailing ship, the Hoogly, as he traversed the vastness of the ocean writing to the woman he loved. His words captivated me, for he shared many qualities with the sailor I had married.

Twenty years later, after the death of my husband’s parents, I learned that this was not the only letter that existed. Over the course of two years, hundreds of pages of original handwritten letters, ship’s logs, and journals emerged from boxes that had been stored for one hundred and fifty years, ending up in the basement of my in-law’s house.

The affection that I had felt for James Jenkins grew to include his entire family, flawed as they were, and especially his wife Ruth, who would ultimately sail the world with him and their little daughter, Minnie.

Both James and Ruth were prolific writers with strong voices. They poured their heart onto the pages they wrote to each other. Through their eyes, I witnessed the day-to-day realities of people living in a seafaring community during the final chapter of the Great Age of Sail and the years leading up to and through the Civil War.

Month after month, I immersed myself in their lives, until they became as familiar to me as my own family. Working with these letters was like stitching together a patchwork quilt. A letter written over the course of weeks or months aboard a sailing ship might spend months more wending its way toward its recipient. I combed through the details hidden within their correspondence and created timelines to understand what had happened on particular days and months in their lives. I pieced together the letters of several family members to create a full picture of this family, beginning with the generation preceding James and Ruth, where this story begins.

There were still holes, however, so I researched newspaper archives for small towns and big cities where their travels led them. I visited lighthouses and went in the backrooms of small museums. I had tea with members of a local historical society and spent many wonderful hours in the Mariner’s Reading Room at Sturgis Library in West Barnstable, where they graciously opened their archives, showing me hand-drawn maps from the 1800s and books which detailed the lives of everyday people in that era.

I accompanied our relatives John and Deb Esborn on a “dead ancestor’s tour” to see the sites, many now erased by time, where the people of this family had lived. Nancy Shoemaker, president of the West Barnstable Historical Society, showed me the graves where our ancestors were buried and the meeting house which figured so prominently in their lives. I checked the phases of the moon and weather events for specific dates in the 1800s. I sailed with my husband, watching the quality of light on the water, scribbling in my journal to capture a hundred different types of waves and cloud formations. Yes, I went all the way down the rabbit hole.

Through the extensive research which resulted in these books, I’ve gained a window into a time in our country that previously felt wooden and remote. In today’s era of instant communication, technological change, and deep divisions within our country, perhaps there are lessons for us here in how to care for each other, endure loss, and fight for those we love. This book strives to do justice to their stories.

So begins the voyage…