What's Going On: Maritime hero Nathaniel Palmer comes to life in new book

Everybody who's lived in southeastern Connecticut for any length of time has heard about the famed sailor Nathaniel Brown Palmer, whose former home is now occupied by Historic Stonington, the town's historical society, and who is the reputed discoverer of Antarctica at the South Pole.But for many of us, the view of Palmer as an explorer is a bit hazy beyond this questionable honor. What else did he accomplish in his 77 years of life? And what was he like as a person?These are the questions taken up by 91-year-old Stonington resident Harry F. Martin in his new book "Nathaniel B. Palmer, Nineteenth Century Master Mariner," published by Historic Stonington and praised by well-known historian Nathaniel Philbrick on the back cover as "the definitive biography of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sailors of his age."It's high praise for a book about a man who hasn't received a full-scale reassessment since the 1922 biography "Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer: An Old-Time Sailor Of The Sea" by John Randolph Spears. Martin is a retired Harvard-trained lawyer with one other book to his credit, "Ernie O'Malley: A Life," about the Irish Republican Army firebrand, published in 2021.Martin was aided in penning this compelling 111-page biography by a large number of previously unpublished letters made available by the extended Palmer family and the Library of Congress, which he sprinkles throughout. What shines through this book is not only Palmer's remarkable effect on the Age of Sail, but his intimate and lifelong relationship with the beautiful town of Stonington and the people who lived there.Palmer was born in 1799 into a seafaring family in Stonington Borough (his father owned a shipyard), brought up at a home on Water Street that offered a view of Long Island Sound. By age 14, he already was off on his first adventure, dodging British blockades during the War of 1812."He learned to pay attention to the sounds waves make in various shallow waters to determine how close to shore his ship could safely sail," Martin, an admitted non-sailor, writes.It was Palmer's keen instincts, along with his longtime love the sea and the lure of the vast fortunes that American ship captains could accumulate, that compelled him to a life of long voyages across the vast and roiling oceans where few others would venture. This included a trip in his early 20s to the southern tip of Argentina for a sealing expedition that brought him in either 1819 or 1820 to Deception Island, within sight of a land mass at one of the northernmost parts of what became known at Antarctica.But Palmer never recorded the sighting in his ship logs, telling of it only 20 years later in a story that friends later embellished to the point where he was credited for many years with the discovery of Earth's remotest continent, at least by zealous Americans. Martin tells the up-to-date story of a Russian navy man named Fabian Gottlieg von Bellinghausen, whom Palmer encountered on one of his early excursions, as being the first to sight the icy land about a year earlier than Palmer.Neither Bellinghausen nor Palmer ever set foot on the continent, though the section the American first spotted from an outlook at Deception Island is still known as Palmerland. Palmer is, however, credited with being the first person, along with Englishman George Powell, with discovering the South Orkney Islands archipelago nearby.Books about Palmer tend to focus on his maritime exploits, which were many and thrilling, including his gun running for the South American revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar, his capture by convicts at a Chilean penal colony that almost cost him his life, and his reputation as a ship-design adviser who helped the United States develop a fleet of clipper ships that could sail to China in record time.He also had a bit of a blind spot, never quite believing that sailing ships would fall by the wayside after the Civil War in favor of steamships with motors."He was absolutely dead wrong," Martin said. "He was holding onto this romantic notion."Martin's book also takes us inside his family life in Stonington, particularly in his later years. In 1850, when the famed sea captain was in Liverpool, his wife Eliza had to write to him the terrible news about their house at Pine Point burning to the ground."Oh, it is sad to be bereft of home and all its comforts," Eliza wrote to him. "Yet many things are spared, life, health, friends and with enough of the worlds goods to make us comfortable."Eliza, who married Palmer at age 16, seems to have had the same boundless spirit as her husband, and she was known quite often to ship out with him on his seafaring adventures, one of the few women to do so."He had an unbelievable belief in himself," Martin said of Palmer. "He keeps doing these incredible things. ... Some people come on this earth, and almost from childhood they have this mission.""That's why I wrote this," Martin said in a phone interview Friday. "This is a major historical figure, and no one has written a book about him."The book is available at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Tom's News in Stonington Borough and Historic Stonington for $25.Lee Howard is The Day's business editor. To reach him, email l.howard@theday.com.