“Looking for a Ship” is the 28th book in John McPhee’s remarkable ouevre.  McPhee grew up in Princeton, NJ where his physician father was the team doctor for Princeton University’s athletic teams.  While traveling the world in search of fascinating topics and people to write about, from the Maine maker of birch bark canoes to the weird cast of characters in Eagle, Alaska, from the orange groves of Florida to the Swiss Army in the Alps, McPhee has remained anchoered to Princeton where he continues to teach as the Professor of Journalism.

His remarkable writing career over more than six decades has resulted in 41 books and has garnered four nominations and one Pulitzer Award.  His students include David Remnick, Richard Preston, Joel Achenbach and others.

I am slowly working my through his books in the order that they were published, reading many of them for the second or in the case of “Coming Into the Country”, the third or fourth time.  His books follow a rather consistent pattern.  He identifies a question, a topic, and a person of interest, and then he digs deeply into that topic in all of its details and ramifications.  Typically, he finds a fascinating person engaged in that activity and explores that person’s knowledge, experience, and mindset traveling with him/her to explore the topic.  Details, details, and more details make his descriptions rich and interesting.

This book explores the U.S. Merchant Marine through the crew of the S.S. Stella Lykes on a 42 day cruise down the west coast of South America stopping at ports in Peru and Ecuador,  loading and unloading shipping containers from its holds and 400 foot long deck.  We meet Andy Chase, the second mate who was the man ‘looking for a ship’ and the great-great-great grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch of Salem, MA who wrote the definitive book on maritime practice. We spend lots of time with the Stella Lykes’ Captain, Paul McHenry Washburn who also comes from a long line of ship captains and is full of nautical wisdom and experience which he generously shares with McPhee.

Along the way we encounter near collisions, violent storms, calms, pirates, stowaways, and the endless work of keeping an old ship from falling apart from rust and weather.  The book is also a sad elegy for the American Merchant Marine fleet, once dominant in the world but disappearing to flags of unregulated nations.  The decline noted in 1990 has inevitably gotten worse over the last 36 years.

This is a classic McPhee book, focused on unique characters and filled to the brim with arcane information and data all rolled up into a fascianting and compelling ball of wax.  After a slow start, I loved it.