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
Nothing Taken is Ever Gone
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 to the treacherous promise of fortune in the Pacific fur trade. But his father's death brings unanswered questions. Nonetheless Bill embarks on a voyage that soon develops into a life-altering odyssey.
He is shipwrecked on a remote Alaska island and must paddle a stolen canoe 1500 miles through unknown and possibly hostile Indigenous country, survive being captured by a Russian man-o-war, outwit merciless thieves, and be chased across the Pacific by revengeful Russian naval officers.
In China he is joined by Delphinia—a fierce and visionary woman whose love is as uncompromising as his situation is dangerous. Upon his return to Oregon, Bill is no longer the boy who left Harvard. He feels burdened by wake of deaths left behind. He asks himself: "Was it all worth it?"
When he returns to Astoria he is confronted by the costs to the Indigenous people of white expansionism called Manifest Destiny, and the devastating effects of "white man's diseases." Bill faces his most important decision: He must choose between profit and purpose, between the seduction of wealth and the slow lessons of responsibility and relationships. With silver in his pocket, he finds it impossible not to work with the few Indigenous survivors. The experience introduces Bill and Delphinia to a new way of living in tune with others and nature as a whole.
Bill and Delphinia greet the birth of their child as a quiet testament to their emerging life. But just as his new life in Oregon begins to take root, betrayal strikes: the stash of money is stolen, money that supported structures, clothing, tools, and sometimes food. Will it scuttle their dreams? Was it, indeed, all worth it?
Did Bill miss a clue that would finally unravel questions about his father's death?