Bibliography, Howard Pease

For our library holdings, please see the catalogue entries for Howard Pease.

Howard Pease (1894 - 1974) wrote from personal experience reflected in how Tod Moran (about 15 of his works were based upon the character William Todhunter Moran) first started to sea, as a summer job while he was attending Stanford University in Palo Alto CA.

Even as a small boy the sea always attracted Howard Pease. Maybe because he lived on inland soil, out of sight of the fogs of the coast, yet on a river that flowed into San Francisco Bay. Born in Stockton, California, he finished high school there and then entered Stanford University.

At the end of his freshman year he found himself enlisted in a university unit which was sent early to France. Two years later he returned to Stanford where he remained off and on until graduation.

Writing had been Mr. Pease's main object and interest ever since the sixth grade and because he had no wish to write and starve in a garret, he now chose teaching as a profession, since it gave him long vacations in which to work at his typewriter.

The sea, too, still attracted him. One summer he shipped out as a wiper in the engine room of a freighter-one of the few ship jobs an inexperienced youth can get.

During Mr. Pease's first year of teaching school he started The Tattooed Man. It was the result of two voyages, together with a walking trip from Marseilles along the coast to Italy. The Jinx Ship was the result of another voyage. His book, The Ship Without a Crew, was written after a tropical winter in Tahiti and Highroad to Adventure after an automobile trip along the Pan-American Highway to Mexico.

With his wife and son, Mr. Pease lived in San Francisco on a hill near the Golden Gate, where he devoted all his working hours to writing.

Other "Pease" mentions:

Several of the Society's early Volumes of the Journal of the [Royal] Cruising Club belonged to and are signed by a J.G. Pease. Relationship, if any, unknown.

Captain "Bully" Hayes (William Henry Hayes, 1827 or 1829 – 1877) (see Bully Hayes, South Sea Pirate by Alfred Lubbock) was arrested in 1870 by the English Consul at Samoa for piracy. There being no prison in this delightful island, the Consul ran Hayes's ship on shore, and waited for a Navy ship to call and take his prisoner away. Hayes spent his time, while under open arrest, he was the life and soul of native picnic parties. When off duty he was a man of great charm of manner and a favourite with the ladies. Presently Captain Pease, another pirate, arrived in an armed ship with a Malay crew. Hayes and Pease quarrelled violently, and the Consul had great trouble to keep the two pirates from coming to blows. This animosity was all a sham to throw dust in the Consul's eyes, for one night Hayes smuggled Pease on board his ship and sailed away. Relationship, if any, unknown.

There was a Captain William Cooke Pease from Martha's Vineyard - see: Florence Kern, Captain Pease U. S. Coast Guard Pioneer, Alised Enterprises, Bethesda, Maryland, 1982. Relationship, if any, unknown

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