Frederick Pease Harlow

Who is Frederick Pease Harlow?

Frederick Pease Harlow was an American sailor, author of The Making of a Sailor, the narrative of his two inaugural voyages, coastwise on New England in 1872 and afterwards to the Far East in the Boston ship Akbar; and Chanteying Aboard American Ships, based on his lifetime of deepwater experience, prepared and posthumously published at the insistence and under the guidance of Ernest Dodge of the Peabody Museum of Salem, Mass.

Born in Langendorf, Germany, Rosner shipped to sea at age 16. Five years later, at the outbreak of World War I, he left his ship in Peru and went to work in a copper mine. After the war he came via Canada to the United States, married, and settled in New York as an undocumented immigrant. He was largely self-taught as a painter and watercolorist. At first his artistic activities were interspersed with voyages in the merchant service. Eventually, he applied himself to marine painting and illustration full time, basing his work on his experiences at sea, on photographs, and on his own substantial and well-informed research. His pictures of merchant vessels—including traditional square-riggers and the modern steamships of his own era—are admirable for accuracy of detail and an authoritative knowledgeability about the ways of a ship that normally only a professional mariner can achieve.