About the Author
Peter S. Sanford
Writing is not my first career. It is my third career after full careers as a journeyman cabinetmaker and industrial energy engineer. In truth, writing should have been my first career, scaling the academic ladder in literature like so many good professional writers, but it was not to be. My first "success" as a writer was an essay published in a local newspaper when I was a sophomore in high school. It talked about the role of our town, Roswell, Georgia in the Civil War for the town's centennial celebration.
I loved doing the research for that article, interviewing descendants of the residents of antebellum homes and pouring over old references. A second essay appeared in a local Corvallis, Oregon newspaper in 2019 about why Atlanta, Georgia did not burn during the civil disobedience of 1964. I have been writing mostly for myself all along but now I am pursuing it as a career with as much gusto as I did pursuing cabinetmaking and industrial energy engineering. But for this career, I am starting with more than a half-century of self-teaching and experimenting with points of view, person, and trying to copy the writing styles of great authors.
I live in Corvallis, Oregon with my wife Susan and cat Freyja. I garden and sing in my church's choir, a basso. I have two sons, both in successful careers of their own, and two gregarious grandchildren. We live simply and read a lot. Freyja seems to like books about mice. And no, I have never sailed on a wind-powered wooden ship.
I read as needed for the project I am researching at the moment. Oftentimes a piece of well-written fiction describes a situation better than non-fiction. Some research is possible on the internet, though not all references there have the necessary provenance.
The Sea Otter Adventure
Set amid the rugged coastline and colonial churn of the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s,The Sea Otter Adventure is a gripping historical novel of survival, greed, kinship, and transformation.
When Bill, a Harvard student, loses his father and his future, he abandons the ivy towers for the treacherous promise of fortune in the Pacific fur trade. Drawn to Astoria by the lucrative demand for sea otter pelts, Bill embarks on a voyage that soon unravels into a life-altering odyssey. Shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska with a sharp-tongued Welsh sailor named Gwyn, Bill's journey tangles with Indigenous worlds, imperial ambitions, and the limits of his values.
Confronted—and then rescued—by the Tlingit peoples, Bill and Gwyn meet Ahnah, a matriarch whose depth and dignity challenge their colonial assumptions. While Gwyn chooses to stay with the Tlingit to document their ways before they are consumed by empire, Bill continues back to Astoria. Along the way, he rescues a French-Canadian fugitive with dangerous secrets of his own.
What follows is a chase across the Pacific: Russian man-o-war, merciless thieves, and narrow escapes set the pace, but the deeper journey is internal. Bill must choose between profit and purpose, between the seduction of wealth and the slow lessons of responsibility and relation. Upon his return to Oregon, Bill is no longer the boy who left Harvard. He is now joined by Delphinia—a fierce and visionary woman whose love is as uncompromising as the land itself.
He and Delphinia are confronted by a few utterly destitute Indigenous people, survivors of the 95% death of their culture and villages in the Willamette Valley. He faces his final decision: rebuild a life from the ruins of greed or return to Boston to repeat the cycles he sought to escape. With cash in his pocket, he finds it impossible not to work with the Indigenous survivors.
Just as his life in Astoria begins to take root, betrayal strikes: the stash of silver that helped support the early building is stolen by the very individual they rescued. This act threatens to collapse what has only just begun. Bill and Delphinia, now partners in this unfolding, greet the birth of their child as a quiet testament to this emergent life. The baby is not a promise of safety but of possibility.