Collection Description

This collection provides an intimate picture of Cecil Northrop's life at sea in the 1920s as a cadet in traning and merchant mariner. Northrop kept extensive diaries (handwritten and typed) where he recorded his impressions of life aboard the ship, foreign ports visited, people he met on his travels, and relationships with friends, family, and love interests. It appears Northrop was compiling some of the manuscripts into essays, and viewed his writing as part of the great sea narrative tradition popularized by Richard Henry Dana in the 1840s. Complementing the diaries are sea certificates and licenses, course and distance logs, and photographs.