Sail!: Can You Command a Sea Voyage?

Children's Literature - Maggie Chase

If this book were set up as a simulation game, I would fail miserably! This is a behind-the-hulls look at what went into preparing a massive ship called a carrack or nau for sailing in the late 1500s from Portugal to India. As the captain, you are responsible for hiring the right officers, then overseeing everything about the ship, including making sure the crew, ship, supplies, and passengers are in order. Then you are faced with all the potential difficulties of sailing, such as navigation, pirates and privateers, storms, and shipwrecks. Once in the hustling port of Goa, you have a multitude of transactions to tender, not the least of which is preparing your ship for a return trip to Portugal. All of these aspects of managing a large ship are briefly discussed and accompanied by clear, finely-detailed, two-page illustrations that enable one to visualize the possibilities (without the muck, stink, and dampness of a real voyage). As this is only an introduction to a voyage, I hope Bruce and Dennis will team up with someone else to create an interactive computer game based on the question asked in the book's subtitle: "Can you command a sea voyage?" Then, readers really could play with all the variables mentioned in the book. Reviewer: Maggie Chase