LETTERS FROM SEA, 1882-1901: JOANNA AND LINCOLN COLCORD’S SEAFARING CHILDHOOD, compiled by Parker Bishop Albee Jr., Tilbury House Publishers and Penobscot Marine Museum, 2000; 168 pages, hardcover, $35.

The first thing to strike me about “Letters From Sea” is the Colcords’ writing voices. Reading their letters is like overhearing a 100-year-old dialogue, making the reader a fascinated participant in their conversation.

For me, the strongest voice belongs to Lincoln Alden Colcord, master of the ships — Charlotte A. Littlefield, Clara E. McGilvery, Gladys, Harvard, and State of Maine — that he and his family voyaged in. Despite the distances sometimes separating him from his family when one or more of them had stayed ashore, he sought in his letters to carry out his duties as husband and father, and he seems to have succeeded. His family consisted of his wife, Jane Sweetser Colcord, and their children Joanna (called Nan) and Lincoln (called Linkie).

Lincoln Sr. and Jane were in their early 20s when they married in 1881 and, the night of their wedding, began traveling the world together in full-rigged sailing ships.

They were members of seafaring families from Searsport, a town 10 percent of American shipmasters called home. Their voyage took them from New York to Australia, Japan and Chile. A little over a year into the trip, their daughter was born at sea off the coast of New Caledonia. Lincoln was born the next year in a storm at sea. His father noted the location of his son’s birth — latitude 40 degrees 45 minutes south, longitude 40 degrees 25 minutes — on a nautical chart.

Mrs. Colcord wrote the news to her mother:

“Well, we have a bit of news that I expect will make you `open your eyes, wide with surprise’; and that is that we have another baby — a boy this time. I expect you will hardly believe it, but it is even so. … I am sorry to say the poor old Charlotte Ann has sprung a leak. … I don’t dare plan anything for it seems so uncertain.”

Mrs. Colcord, we learn later, is always filled with anxiety (often well-founded) about disasters at sea, and fears never seeing home again.

Sometimes Capt. Colcord went to sea alone, leaving his wife with one or both of the children in Searsport where Joanna and young Lincoln attended school. During those times, his letters to the children expressed his love and his longing for their company:

Buenos Aires, June 26, 1889

MY DEAR LITTLE DAUGHTER:

I wonder if you are expecting a letter from Papa. … This is a pretty pleasant place. The first thing that delighted Linkie after we came to anchor, was the diving of the pelicans. … Mama, Linkie, and I went on shore yesterday, and walked way around the beach picking up shells.

Buenos Aires, April 14, 1894

MY DEAR BOY:

I received your letter in Mama’s, and was very glad to know that you thought of me and were waiting for next summer, when we may meet again. … I am glad you like your school, and hope you always will. … I am looking forward to the time when I can be with you again.

The most memorable trips the children made were in the early to mid-1890s on the Harvard. Those trips took them to Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and settled firmly within them a deep and abiding love of the sea which informed the rest of their lives.

Joanna would graduate from the University of Maine in Orono and spend her life as a social worker in New York. But in 1924, her book, “Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen,” was published. Lincoln, too, attended the University of Maine, where he studied engineering. But he had a yen for the pen and would write poetry, short stories and the lyrics of “The Maine Stein Song.”

His books include “An Instrument of God and Other Stories of the Sea,” “The Drifting Diamond” and “The Game of Life and Death: Stories of the Sea.” He would be one of the founders of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport and be known for his knowledge of maritime history.

The Colcord letters are knit together by the younger Lincoln Colcord’s running commentary taken from his manuscript, “Letters from Sea,” that had lain unpublished for 80 years.

He writes:

“My first conscious memory is of the sea. It is one of those vivid pictures photographed on the mind of a young child which live with singular completeness and vitality in after years. I must have been about 4 years old … saltness, too, is part of this first sea recollection.”

Andrew J. Nesdall, maritime historian, puts the Colcords’ story in perspective by explaining the shipping trade and its customs at the end of the century when sailing ships were fast giving way to steam. Parker Bishop Albee Jr., curator of the Lincoln Colcord papers, says in his introduction:

“In these letters, written in an excellent prose style, emerge the vicissitudes of life at sea. We share with the family the exhilaration of catching the trades under fair skies, yet we are ever conscious of the uncertainties … typhoons and dismasting, wrecks, and financial disaster.”

“Letters from Sea” is a beautifully made book, a pleasure to look at and touch. It is illustrated with Colcord family photographs, many taken by Joanna on a voyage on the State of Maine in 1899. I especially like John Arrison’s map showing the Colcord voyages. I was pleased to find an index and bibliography, both so helpful to us armchair and family historians.

A volume of Lincoln Colcord’s sea stories also has been edited by Donald Mortland of Unity.

A special exhibit at the Penobscot Marine Museum, “Travels to the Pacific Rim,” details the Colcord voyages. The museum, located at 5 Church St., opens for the season on Memorial Day weekend. For more information, call (207) 548-2529. The Web site address is: www.penobscotmarinemuseum.com.