Elmer Milz

Growing Up at Sea: a Whaling Adventure Elmer Milz

This is the story of a German boy from a large and impoverished family who is sent to sea at the age of twelve. He serves as cabin boy on a small sailing vessel plying the Baltic and the waters of the English Channel. His vessel ventures to the Azores where it is lost in a violent storm. The boy survives and finds a temporary home in the Islands. He, along with several members of the ship wrecked crew, is allowed to ship out on a large three-masted sailing vessel that had moored off the island to replenish water casks. The boy makes friends and enemies and narrowly escapes from a lava flow in the Hawaiian Islands. He helps capture whales and experiences the joys and miseries of sailing when his vessel rounds Cape Horn. He endures the extreme cold and loneliness of the far north when the whale ship over winters, ice bound, in the Arctic Ocean. As a young man, he endures the hazards and temptations of San Francisco in the 1890's, where the whale ship discharges cargo and crew. He has grown up at sea.