Wake of the Schooners: From Placentia to Port aux Basques Creative Publishers, St. John's: 1993 To Order Book (Go to site) Robert Parsons - Newfoundland Author

One more fortunate stroke of luck, coupled with the file of wrecks mentioned above, produced another book. Summer 1992, my son worked in St. John's and our family rented a house there for the summer.

That meant I had two months to relax and research at my leisure (in the A.C. Hunter NF Reference Library, at the Public Archives and in the Memorial University Newfoundland Room), compile information, and shape it into another shipwreck manusript. I presented Wake of the Schooners, complete with 80-90 photos to Creative Publishers in the late fall of 1992. On June 23, 1993, I received my first copy of Wake, my third book! Amazing!

Written in the same style as the two previous, Wake of the Schooners encompasses the whole of the South Coast of Newfoundland from Placentia Bay to Port aux Basques. Chronologically it spans from the wreck of the Swedish bark Monasco near Burin in 1857 to the disappearance of the Burgeo dragger Cape Royal in 1977. Twelve chapters, scores of wild and tragic shipwrecks captured in word and picture.

Prohibition -- an era that produced rumrunners and the illegal trade of alcohol from St. Pierre to the American shores meant a new way of life for otherwise God-fearing South Coast fishermen and their ships.

One of the most unusual stories is the pursuit of rumrunner Chappel Point, a vessel owned in Belleoram. Her crew of Newfoundland sailors, ended up off the coast of Mexico in the Pacific Ocean with their vessel afire! After Chappel Point went down in a mass of flames, they were transported to British Columbia and left to find their own way home, if they could. Wake of the Schooners, full of unique and tragic stories and yarns of Newfoundland sailors, is now into its third reprint and shows no signs of slowing down.