Seacoast History Blog #60
August 11, 2009

Here we go again. Writing history is looking more and more like that ringing gag in the film "Caddyshack" where Bill Murray tries every trick possible to catch an underground gopher. I went down another gopher hole today while researching Chapter 4 of my next book on privateering. Before that I was covering a lot of ground, digging up details on Captain Thomas Boyd, one of the most successful and gutsy privateersman during the War of 1812. Sailing the Baltimore schooner Chasseur, he took more prizes in a single day than anyone before or since. Then he faced a British warship head on, despite falling into a surprise attack, won the day, and retired rich and happy. (Continued below)

The Chauseur was the fastest and most beautiful sailing chip of its era, so beautiful, one contemporary critic wrote, that it looked like it could lift up out of the sea and fly. Marylanders called it ‘The Pride of Baltimore" and in 1975 Melbourne Smith reproduced that ship in Baltimore. He also built the privateer Lynx, which is what I’m writing about now and we’ve been corresponding for months.

Privateer hero Thomas Boyle

Captain Boyle is a totally cool character who lived in Fells Point. MD which I visited not long ago. It’s like Portsmouth with an historic port, lots of federal brick houses, and a funky gentrified tourism industry based on retelling tales of its seafaring past.

Anyway, Boyle has never really gotten his due. He captured fifty-something British merchant ships and faced off against two warships all while part of his own private navy. But it’s hard to find out much detail on Boyle’s private life and personality, other than the details of battles he fought and the prizes he captured. So I was glad to discover a book called "The Cruise of the Comet" by James Otis published around 1895. Before he captained the Chasseur, Boyle conducted at least three hair-raising voyages aboard the privateer Comet, also built at Fells Point, by the same guy who built the original Lynx and Chasseur. The Privateer Lynx, you will remember, is what my next book is about.

Discovering James Otis Kaler (1848-1912)

I know about Otis from his book about John Paul Jones. It comes up a lot in research which means there are a lot of copies of his JPJ book still floating around. But it is just a secondary source, a book for kids really, so I have never read it through. "The Cruise of the Comet" too, from what I could see online, looked like another adventure book for boys. But curiously, Otis says in the subtitle, that the book is based on the letters of a former Comet crewman named Stephan, who wrote a series of letters to his cousin – get this – in Portsmouth, NH.

This got me curious about Otis, and this is where I went down the gopher hole. His full name, it turns out is James Otis Kaler. There is a James Otis Kaler Elementary School in nearby South Portland, Maine. That’s because the author was also superintendent of schools there in the early 20^th century.

Born in Winterport, ME, Kaler (aka Otis) worked as a journalist for the Boston Journal and then the New York Sun. Then in 1890 he got an editorial job with Frank Leslie’s Boys and Girls, a publishing company. This explains why, when I looked up his books, there were dozens of them – mostly adventure tales for boys aged 10-14. Otis wrote about the sea, the prairie, about spies and pirates, about the first airships, newsies, early settlers cowboys soldiers, stowaways and mine workers.

This age group is still a large marketplace for publishers today. The weird thing is, I’ve been writing juvenile history too. I penned two small history adventure books for middle schoolers a few years back and just finished another one this summer. And to make it even weirder, Kaler, writing as James Otis, wrote a book on every topic I touched, and scores more. According to his December 12, 1912 obituary in the New York Times, James Otis penned no less than 145 books.

As someone who struggles to complete a book a year, that number boggles me, especially since Otis (aka Kaler) wrote 145 books while working other jobs during a period of about 30 years – and using a typewriter and carbon paper. And these are pretty weighty little books, with only a few pictures and lots of text. That averages out at almost five books per year from his first in 1880, nonstop until his death at age 64.

You’ve heard of his first book – Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus -- that was later made into a Disney movie for the Boomer generation. You probably have not heard of the other 144.

You could call his work "boy books" which the author certainly did. That is a topic I’ve done considerable study on since discovering "Story of a Bad Boy" by Portsmouth’s visiting author Thomas Bailey Aldrich. .

" The American boy of to-day doesn't want a hero of the ' goody- goody ' sort," James Otis told a reporter from THE WRITER in 1907.

Sounding a bit like Horatio Alger himself, Otis noted that he wrote books that boys wanted to buy with limited cash. They want to read stories of great success, he told THE WRITER, because they have little cash in their own pockets. And they don’t want stories of love or girls. Boys want stories about boys, he says, about adventure, friendship, loyalty, imagination, and personal success.

"I believe that the American boy of to-day expects his ideal book-boy to have a great deal of snap and plenty of backbone," Otis said.

But enough of that. I am climbing out of the gopher hole now and heading back to the War of 1812. Look for my book on the Privateer Lynx on the shelves in 2012.

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.