Derek Lundy, best-selling author of Godforsaken Sea, comes from seafaring stock. His latest book is a reimagining of a voyage his great-great uncle Benjamin took around Cape Horn in 1885. The late 19th century marked the final days of sail and the end of a type of man who would weather the seas around “Cape Stiff” with a stoicism born of desperation. The Way of a Ship, though billed as a biography, is ultimately a heartfelt paean to the hard men of that era and technology, to the thousands who were wrecked or swept overboard or went missing, presumed lost.

We set sail on a voyage with Benjamin aboard the fictional ship Beara Head out of Liverpool bound for Valparaiso, Chile, with a cargo of coal. But once at sea, Lundy soon tacks away from his story line. His first love is the technology of sailing, the buntlines and clewlines and the 32 sails (jibs, topsails, spanker, topgallants), and here his research is impressive. He has studied what records there are, verified his research through a chance encounter with a four-master that still operates today, and rounded “that mythic and feared sea” on a disappointingly sunny day. Sailing aficionados – and they are legion – will appreciate the author’s painstaking attention to the details of sailing.

Those same details overburden the Beara Head’s voyage. The story of Benjamin – “a book that’s impossible to write” – is soon caught in the doldrums. Lundy lacks the novelist’s ability to recreate that forgotten world, so he creates a series of typical experiences – a storm, a fire below – then borrows heavily from Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and their more memorable experiences at sea.

The Way of a Ship is a curious amalgam. It’s a biography with little knowledge of its subject (Lundy has little to go on but a photograph of his great uncle and a couple of letters). It’s a history that veers into the present day. It’s non-fiction, but uses the fictional Beara Head and its crew to tell its story. With such conflicting currents, the ship too often loses its way. What saves the story is the sea itself – the unknowable beauty and terror of it.