Schooner master: A portrait of David Stevens - Hardcover

Carnahan, Peter

9780930031237: Schooner master: A portrait of David Stevens

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0930031237 ISBN 13: 9780930031237

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub. Co, 1989

David Stevens, a Nova Scotia farmer with a ninth-grade education, did not take up the boatbuilding trade until he was 38. He went on to build more than seventy boats, among them some of the swiftest schooners on the Atlantic coast. His legendary skill as a boatbuilder won him an invitation to Montreal's Expo in 1967 to build the schooner Atlantica for the Maritime Provences pavilion. A few years later Queen Elizabeth awarded him the Order of Canada, his country's highest honor, for his work as a master craftsman of schooners.

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From the Publisher:

In SCHOONER MASTER, Peter Carnahan draws a sensitive portrait of this artist in wood, who called himself "the last of a breed." Carnahan walks woodlots with Stevens, travels with him to Big Tancook, the island where he was born, and observes him as he builds the Evelyn, the fifth boat in his retirement fleet. In telling Stevens' story, Carnahan also paints a vivid picture of the people and landscape of Nova Scotia.

The author then takes the reader out as a passenger aboard another Stevens boat, the Kathi Anne II, during Schooner Race Week in Lunenburg. The author gives us an unforgettable close-up of Stevens as master yachtsman, a quiet but commanding presence behind the helm, a fierce but gentlemanly competitor.

When he died early in 1989, CBC Radio said, "David Stevens' hands and spirit joined to create something like religious devotion expressed in wood. He said he built boats because a boat is more like a living creature than anything else a man can build with his own hands."

About the Author:

Peter Carnahan is a writer and theatrical director who was, for eighteen years, head of the theatre and literature programs of The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has written four novels and two books of nonfiction. His articles, short stories and poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, The North American Review, Boulevard and Tabula Rasa.

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