VoyageA novel of 1896 Author:Sterling Hayden Using the Shipping Industry as a microcosm for one of the most turbulent periods in our history, this wide-canvas, tumultuous novel is at once a rousing tale of the sea, an incisive portrait of the rich during the Gilded Age of robber barons, a tough look at the first stirrings of the labor movement, and an epic vision of a watershed year in Ame... more »rican History. On New Year's Day 1896, the huge steel-hulled, four-masted square rigger Neptune's Car slides down the ways of a Maine shipyard--the pride of Banning Butler Blanchard, shipbuilder extraordinaire. With a cargo of coal, under the command of Captain Irons Saul Pendleton, Neptune's Car claws her way down the coast and around the Horn to San Francisco on a torturous maiden voyage that drives her crew to murder and near mutiny. It is a voyage that is a litany of the horrors of life below deck on a "hellship" during the age of sail, and it moves seaman Simon Basil Harwar to confront the ruthless, and sometimes sadistic, men on the bridge, who drive the crew beyond human endurance. In counterpoint to the harrowing trip of Neptune's Car, the luxurious private yacht Atalanta sails on an idyllic cruise through the South Pacific carrying Blanchard's daughter, Mrs. Montague Cutting, her husband and a party of gilded aristocrats to Japan. Both ships arrive in San Francisco harbor on the eve of the Bryan-McKinley Presidential election--when the chasm between the haves and have-nots threatens the city with riot and insurrection. Will the land belong to the rich and privileged few like the Blanchards and Cuttings, or can Harwar, his mates, and the workingman share in the American Dream?« less