A Voice from the Main Deck by Samuel Leech

The full title is Thirty Years from Home, or a Voice from the Main Deck; Being the Experience of Samuel Leech, Who Was Six Years in the British and American Navies: Was Captured in the British Frigate Macedonian: Afterwards Entered the American Navy, and Was Taken in the United States Brig Syren, by the British Ship Medway of Samuel Leech. And I take issue with that title: because it advertises itself to be an account “from the Main Deck” around the War of 1812, a war memoir, I bought this book and read it. It isn’t a war memoir. Instead, it’s the life story of somebody who once served on the main deck. The war memoir portions may occupy a quarter of the book, and it’s in the most general terms—Leech keeps telling his readers to refer to newspapers if they’re interested. Seriously. A guy sits down to write his memoirs, and asks his readers to read the newspapers to get a sense of what it was like on the main deck. This undercuts the author’s authority by constantly cutting off when he almost provides insight into the day to day. Clearly not a great tactic. Today it would be like referring the reader to Wikipedia in the middle of your book, because you can’t be bothered to write your own book. In his defense, there are a few interesting paragraphs. I would quote them here so you wouldn’t have to read it, but I’m afraid it would tempt you to try and read the book. Help me help you not buy this book. Even at 99¢.

So, a fair question is what the book actually is about, compared to what it is advertised as? In the end, this book is less about what it says on the cover, and more about the author himself. The author only spends a few of those thirty years advertised on a ship—maybe five or six. The main focus of the book is what pet peeves Leech has: gambling, alcohol, lying, and flogging. He ignores what most Methodists would consider sexual sins, but maybe that’s because he’s trying to make his book “genteel”. He speaks from experience, so it’s easy to spot his biases. But he frames his statements as if he writes the truth, nothing but the truth, and the whole truth. For instance, in the case of flogging—which I am not into, for the record—he states that the public shame ruined every man who was flogged, then launches on a written crusade against flogging. Yet, he consistently gives us examples of flogged people who appear to have come out the other side mentally healthy. He draws a big comparison between the British ships he served on, which flogged heavily, and the American ones—he never mentions any American floggings. Yet, he never deserts from his flogging ships until the last one is taken in war and desertion is set up for him, while he deserts from his American ship later. He talks consistently about his desire to be at sea—most of the book takes place on land—yet takes few steps to get there. These incongruities built throughout the book and I was dissatisfied with my read. I kept reading hoping he would get back to sea, like he talked about, so I could read more about the differences in how American and British ships of the period were run.

The focus of the book rests on the author’s personal transformation from a heathen sailor to a Methodist Christian shopkeeper, and the title is misleading for that. From the Main Deck apparently refers to feeling guilt over buying and selling rum at his shop. Something like Baa Baa Black Sheep by Pappy Boyington has this moralizing element as well, but Boyington restricts himself to a few pages of that transformation, and focuses on writing his wartime memoirs. That’s a much more effective book and writing tactic than the one used by Leech here.

This is a bad book and I wish I hadn’t read it. I hope to someday find an interesting book from the main deck’s point of view in a man of war from this time period. But this author trusts too much in his audience’s familiarity with the normal, and ignores the title of his book in order to spend most of his time shilling for donations for his new Christian outreach organization. It wasn’t informative or gripping. It was rambling and navel gazing.