Richard K. Perkins is finishing his first novel, The Tide Waits for No Woman, scheduled for
16 September 2025. Please revisit this site for updates on this release, and don't miss checking the blogs called Crosscurrents here and the FAQs called Did You Know?
There is another novel in the works called The Running Fix involving most of the same characters.
Abby (Parker) Anderson is a public school teacher and the daughter of a professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She is about to marry a merchant sea captain and is eleven years his junior. Clifford Anderson is not seen as a good match as a seagoing fellow--with no formal education past the eighth grade--by her Parker family, Bowdoin faculty, and Brunswick society.
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Abby knows that his education didn't stop with his departure from the classroom, and she senses he has a much better grasp of cultural similarities and differences up and down the coast than her father's Abolitionist colleagues.
For instance, take McCrady's in Charleston, where the business and the social events of the topsail schooner Laura Lee take place. The full spectrum of Southern views is exercised there in front of the Yankee trader--whom some accuse of being a spy while they enjoy the ice he has brought them from New England.
In the meantime, here's some photos I have taken while researching these novels.© 2024 by Richard K. Perkins. Proudly created with Wix.com
Abby has an idyllic view of "going to sea" and what she knows about it is that "men get to travel."
Day's Ferry on the Kennebec River includes farms such as the Andersons' honeymoon nest and first purchase.
Abby has been a regular churchgoer; Days Ferry has a "re-start" for her non-practicing Lutheran.
Seguin Island Light is the first ocean-going mark heading out or coming back for Clifford.
Captain Clifford Anderson has been in coastal trade since he was sent to sea at fifteen as a seaman under instruction by a trusted sea captain, sailing an Anderson-built ship owned by a customer of Clifford's father. So, he is familiar with many of the small ports where his coastal topsail schooner has an advantage over the larger merchant vessels.
One exception to the "small port" principle is the port of Charleston, where Clifford's father, a shipwright in Kittery, has a business partner. Colonel Dowling produces cotton for the textile mills in New England and has a local business in ice houses for the ice delivered in the Laura Lee bottoms as well as manufactured goods from New England.
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