2017 Wooden Boat Festival

Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail and Steam is Captain Daniel O. Killman's story of his five decades at sea. It is a gripping memoir of Killman’s life at sea during the waning days of sail and the rise of steam, during which he experienced wind and weather, dismasting and shipwreck, hostile crews, legal tangles, officious bureaucrats. It was written in the 1930’s, then put aside for forty years. In the mid-1970’s Captain Killman’s daughter gave it to Harold Huycke, a maritime historian, believing he would know what to do with it. Complications arose just before it was to be published, and it was laid aside for another forty years. It was re-discovered in Harold Huycke’s files after his death, slightly re-edited by his daughter, Rebecca Huycke Ellison, and finally published in 2016.