Born on June 15, 1881, William McFee spent much of his life moving between two demanding professions: marine engineering and writing. Long before he became known for novels and essays about ships and sailors, he had worked in engine rooms, crossed oceans aboard merchant vessels, risen to the rank of chief engineer, and experienced the routines and uncertainties of life at sea firsthand. Those years gave his maritime writing an authenticity that could not easily be learned from books alone.
McFee belonged to a rich tradition of writers who transformed the sea from a backdrop for adventure into a setting for examining character, work, loneliness, responsibility, and human relationships. His best-known novel, Casuals of the Sea, drew upon a world he understood intimately, while books such as Letters from an Ocean Tramp and Swallowing the Anchor allowed him to combine travel, observation, philosophy, humor, and memories of working ships.
Although his name is less familiar today than those of some other twentieth-century maritime writers, McFee enjoyed a long literary career and produced fiction, essays, criticism, biography, and travel writing. His unusual life gave him something particularly valuable as an author: he knew what it meant to spend long months at sea, yet he also possessed the curiosity of a lifelong reader who continually tried to understand the people and places he encountered.
🎂 Born Into a Seafaring Family
William Morley Punshon McFee was born on June 15, 1881, aboard the Erin’s Isle, the three-masted ship owned and captained by his father, John Henry McFee. The circumstances seem almost too appropriate for a writer who would eventually devote so much of his work to ships and the people who sailed them.
The sea was part of McFee’s family history as well as his birthplace. His father was a sea captain, and maritime life formed part of the world into which he was born. The family later settled in the London area, where McFee grew up and attended school in England.
Even before making a career at sea, McFee showed signs of the interests that would define his adulthood. He read widely, wrote poetry, and developed a particular enthusiasm for Rudyard Kipling. At the same time, however, he pursued a practical profession rather than immediately attempting to make his living as a writer.
That combination of literature and machinery would remain central to his life. McFee was not a gentleman observer traveling aboard ships for material. He learned engineering, worked with machinery, and eventually understood ships from below deck, where heat, noise, maintenance, discipline, and technical skill kept vessels moving across enormous distances.
⚙️ From Engineering Shops to the Engine Room
As a young man, McFee trained and worked in mechanical engineering. He was employed in engineering shops and gained the technical background that would later allow him to enter the merchant marine as an engineer rather than as a deck officer.
By his mid-twenties, the prospect of life ashore had lost some of its appeal. In 1905, McFee accepted a position as a junior engineer aboard the tramp steamer Rotherfield. The decision changed both his profession and his writing.
Tramp steamers did not necessarily travel predictable passenger routes between glamorous destinations. They went where cargo and commercial demand required them to go, carrying goods between ports throughout the world. For someone as observant as McFee, such voyages provided an almost endless supply of personalities, conversations, landscapes, industrial scenes, and unfamiliar cultures.
The engine room gave him a particularly unusual perspective. Maritime literature had long celebrated captains, storms, navigation, shipwrecks, and sailors working on deck, but modern steamships depended equally upon the largely unseen men tending boilers and engines below. McFee knew their work because he had performed it himself.
He eventually rose through the profession to become a chief engineer, carrying substantial responsibility for the machinery upon which an entire vessel depended.
🌊 Letters from an Ocean Tramp
McFee’s first book, Letters from an Ocean Tramp, appeared in 1908 while he was still a working marine engineer. The book grew directly from his experiences aboard ship and demonstrated that his interest in maritime life extended far beyond conventional adventure stories.
McFee observed not merely ports and landscapes but the peculiar psychology of long voyages. Life aboard a ship creates a temporary society in which people who might otherwise never meet are confined together for weeks or months. Rank, work, personality, boredom, argument, humor, and companionship become unusually visible under such circumstances.
He was interested in what people thought about when their daily surroundings were reduced to machinery, water, sky, fellow crew members, and the next port. That reflective quality distinguished McFee from writers primarily interested in dramatic maritime incidents.
The book also established something that would become characteristic of his career: McFee wrote while continuing to work. Literature did not initially replace engineering. The two lives existed beside one another, and the practical experiences of one continually supplied material for the other.
📖 Turning Toward Fiction
McFee gradually expanded from travel writing and maritime observations into fiction. His first novel, Aliens, appeared in 1914. By then, he had spent years moving between engineering work, ocean voyages, reading, and writing.
His fiction frequently drew upon the cosmopolitan environment of international shipping. Ships naturally brought together people of different nationalities, classes, languages, and backgrounds, while ports introduced sailors to communities that could be dramatically different from the places they called home.
For McFee, this diversity made maritime life an ideal setting for exploring human behavior. A ship might contain strict professional hierarchies, but the isolation of a voyage could also strip away some of the protections and performances of ordinary social life.
Characters revealed themselves through work, conversation, boredom, conflict, fear, and responsibility. McFee understood that the real drama aboard ship was not always a storm or mechanical disaster. Sometimes it was simply the difficulty of living alongside other people.
⚓ Casuals of the Sea
Published in 1916, Casuals of the Sea became McFee’s best-known novel and helped establish his reputation as a serious writer of maritime fiction. The book drew upon the experiences and personalities he had encountered during his years at sea, but it was more than a documentary account of merchant shipping.
McFee was interested in people who found themselves temporarily displaced from ordinary life. Ships gather individuals whose destinations, motivations, and personal histories may have almost nothing in common. During a voyage, however, they must inhabit the same confined world.
The word “casuals” itself suggests people thrown together by circumstance. That idea fascinated McFee throughout his writing. Travel disrupts familiar patterns and creates unexpected relationships. The person encountered briefly on a ship or in a foreign port may disappear forever, yet the encounter can remain vivid for decades.
McFee’s own experience enabled him to write about the technical realities of shipboard life without making technical description the entire point of the story. Machinery, watches, engine rooms, officers, crew quarters, and working routines contribute to the atmosphere because they belong naturally to the world his characters inhabit.
🌍 An Atlantic Literary Life
McFee’s life increasingly connected Britain and the United States. He crossed the Atlantic repeatedly and eventually spent substantial periods in America, where his books found an audience and where he formed connections with American writers and literary circles.
One of the interesting qualities of McFee’s career is that he did not fit neatly into a single national literary tradition. Born into a family with strong Canadian connections, raised and educated in England, employed on international ships, and later settled in the United States, he developed the outlook of someone accustomed to crossing borders.
Ships themselves encourage that perspective. A vessel may be registered in one country, employ people from several others, carry cargo belonging to still more, and arrive in ports scattered across the world. National boundaries remain important, but sailors experience them differently from people whose lives remain rooted in one community.
That international outlook became part of McFee’s literary identity. His world was populated by engineers, officers, passengers, dockworkers, travelers, expatriates, merchants, and people moving between cultures.
⚔️ World War I & Service at Sea
The outbreak of World War I transformed international shipping and brought new dangers to maritime life. McFee returned to British service and worked aboard transport ships during the conflict, eventually serving as a sublieutenant in the Royal Navy.
Merchant vessels and military transports were essential to the war effort, carrying soldiers, supplies, equipment, and food across waters threatened by enemy action. Marine engineers faced their own particular responsibilities because a ship’s survival could depend upon keeping its machinery operating under difficult conditions.
The war added another layer to McFee’s understanding of the sea. Commercial shipping already involved danger and uncertainty, but wartime service placed ships and crews within a vast military system in which ordinary maritime routines could suddenly become matters of life and death.
As with so many other parts of his experience, the war eventually entered his writing indirectly and directly. McFee rarely needed to invent a romantic image of maritime danger. He had witnessed enough of the realities himself.
🍌 The United Fruit Company Years
After World War I, McFee returned to commercial shipping and worked for the United Fruit Company, eventually serving as a chief engineer. The company’s ships connected the United States with ports in the Caribbean and Latin America, giving McFee yet another set of landscapes, cultures, and maritime communities to observe.
The position of chief engineer involved far more than mechanical knowledge. A chief engineer supervised the personnel and equipment responsible for the vessel’s propulsion and mechanical systems. It required management, discipline, judgment, and the ability to respond quickly when machinery failed.
McFee therefore spent years occupying two very different but surprisingly compatible roles. At sea he was responsible for machinery and men; at his desk he became an observer trying to understand the personalities and situations he had encountered.
His literary imagination never drifted far from working life. Ships in McFee’s writing were not decorative yachts floating through picturesque waters. They were complicated industrial environments filled with people earning their living.
✍️ Choosing Literature
By 1924, McFee finally left regular seagoing employment and committed himself fully to writing. He had spent nearly two decades moving between literature and engineering, producing books even while maintaining the demanding schedule of a merchant marine officer.
Leaving the sea did not mean abandoning it imaginatively. Maritime experience had become the great reservoir from which much of his writing flowed. Years later he could still recreate the personalities, arguments, routines, smells, sounds, machinery, and peculiar social relationships of shipboard life.
In one sense, becoming a full-time writer represented a dramatic change. In another, McFee simply shifted the balance between two activities he had practiced simultaneously for years.
The sailor remained inside the author. Even after settling ashore, McFee retained the habits of someone accustomed to international travel and to observing people in temporary communities.
⚓ Swallowing the Anchor
The phrase “swallowing the anchor” traditionally refers to a sailor giving up the sea and settling permanently ashore, making it an especially appropriate title for McFee’s 1925 collection Swallowing the Anchor.
The book brought together essays and recollections inspired by his maritime experiences. By this stage of his career, McFee could look back upon life at sea from the perspective of someone who had chosen writing as his principal occupation.
Yet nostalgia did not erase the realities of maritime work. McFee understood both the attraction and hardship of seafaring. The sea could offer freedom from conventional routines, exposure to other cultures, intense friendships, and memorable adventures, but it also required long absences, uncomfortable conditions, physical labor, professional discipline, and separation from home.
That dual perspective gives maritime memoir its particular value. A writer who has left the sea may romanticize what has been lost, but memory also allows patterns to emerge that were difficult to perceive while living through them.
🧭 More Than Adventure Stories
Calling McFee a writer of sea stories is accurate, but it can make his books sound narrower than they actually are. The sea provided his setting and much of his experience, but people were his real subject.
He was fascinated by personality. Voyages brought him into contact with people he would never otherwise have met, and his writing often examines how individuals behave when removed from familiar surroundings.
McFee also possessed an essayist’s curiosity. He could move from a description of machinery to a reflection on art, politics, literature, human foolishness, or social behavior. His reading accompanied him across oceans, and the engineer who maintained steamship machinery was simultaneously thinking about writers, ideas, and the strange habits of human beings.
That combination makes him an intriguing literary figure. McFee was neither an academic writing abstractly about the maritime world nor a sailor who happened to record adventures. He consciously brought intellectual curiosity and professional seafaring experience together.
📚 Friendship, Books & the Literary World
Once established as a writer, McFee became part of a transatlantic literary community that included authors, editors, publishers, and critics. His work attracted readers who appreciated the unusual combination of technical experience and reflective prose.
McFee’s friendship with writer Christopher Morley became one of his notable literary associations. Morley admired his writing and helped draw attention to books such as Casuals of the Sea. Their connection reflected a broader literary culture in which writers enthusiastically recommended one another’s work through essays, reviews, correspondence, and personal friendships.
McFee also continued producing books across several genres. In addition to novels and maritime essays, he wrote biography and criticism, demonstrating interests that extended beyond the ships with which his name became most closely associated.
His literary papers preserved in major research libraries reveal how extensive that career became. Manuscripts, correspondence, drafts, essays, and proofs provide a record of a writer who continued revising and producing work long after he had swallowed the anchor.
🏡 Life in Connecticut
McFee eventually made his home in Connecticut, joining a long tradition of writers who found in New England a place to work while remaining connected to publishing centers such as New York.
Settling inland after so many years aboard ships created an interesting contrast. The chief engineer who had once crossed oceans according to commercial schedules now lived a comparatively settled literary life.
The sea, however, continued to occupy his imagination. Writers do not necessarily leave their most important landscapes when they move away from them physically. Memory can preserve sounds and routines with extraordinary force, and McFee had accumulated years of material before settling ashore.
Connecticut became his home for the later decades of his life, but the ships, engine rooms, ports, and personalities of his earlier years continued sailing through his books.
🖋️ A Writer Who Had Done the Work
Perhaps the strongest reason to rediscover William McFee is the authority that comes from experience. He wrote about working ships because he had worked aboard them. He understood engines because he had been responsible for them. He understood the tensions of a crew because he had lived among crews for months at a time.
Experience alone does not create good literature, of course. Many people live remarkable lives without turning them into memorable books. What distinguished McFee was his ability to combine experience with observation.
He noticed people. He listened to their stories, arguments, prejudices, jokes, dreams, and complaints. He understood that the enormous machinery of international shipping ultimately depended upon individuals performing their jobs day after day.
That attention to working life gives his maritime writing historical value as well as literary interest. His books preserve something of a world in transition, when steamships connected continents and engineers occupied an increasingly important place in a maritime tradition once dominated imaginatively by sails.
🕯️ William McFee’s Later Years
McFee continued writing after leaving the merchant marine, producing a substantial body of fiction and nonfiction over the following decades. The experiences accumulated during his years at sea proved more than sufficient for a lifetime of reflection.
His later work included maritime essays, novels, historical writing, and books examining the sea from the perspective of someone who understood both its romance and its practical demands. Even when writing away from ships, he retained the observational habits developed during decades of travel.
William McFee died on July 2, 1966, at his home in New Milford, Connecticut. By then, more than half a century had passed since the publication of Letters from an Ocean Tramp, and the maritime world itself had changed considerably.
The tramp steamers and working conditions of his early career increasingly belonged to history, making the books he left behind records of a disappearing way of life as well as works of literature.
🌊 Rediscovering William McFee
McFee is no longer as widely read as he was during the height of his career, but that relative obscurity makes him particularly interesting to rediscover. Literary history contains many writers whose reputations rise, fade, and occasionally return as new generations find something unexpectedly relevant in their work.
Readers interested in maritime literature will naturally find much to explore, but McFee also deserves attention from anyone interested in working life, travel writing, early twentieth-century technology, or the relationship between professional experience and literature.
His career challenges the idea that a writer must live primarily within the literary world. For years, McFee wrote while performing an extremely technical profession thousands of miles from the publishing offices where his books eventually appeared.
The engine room and the writing desk might appear to belong to entirely different lives. McFee demonstrated that they could belong to the same one.
🎂 Remembering William McFee on His Birthday
June 15 offers a fitting opportunity to remember William McFee, a writer whose relationship with the sea began almost literally at birth and continued throughout his literary life.
Born aboard his father’s ship in 1881, McFee eventually became a marine engineer himself, traveled widely aboard steamships, rose to chief engineer, served during World War I, worked on commercial routes between the United States and the Caribbean, and somehow found time amid all of it to become an author.
Those experiences gave him something impossible to manufacture after the fact. When McFee wrote about a ship, he knew what made it move. When he wrote about engineers and sailors, he knew what their work demanded. When he described the odd temporary societies created aboard vessels crossing oceans, he had lived inside them.
Yet William McFee’s lasting interest lies not simply in the accuracy of his maritime details. Beneath the machinery and salt water is a writer fascinated by people: how they behave when far from home, what work reveals about them, what they say when there is nowhere else to go, and how brief encounters can remain in memory long after a voyage has ended.
For readers discovering him today, Letters from an Ocean Tramp and Casuals of the Sea offer natural places to begin. Together they introduce a writer whose unusual career joined engineering, travel, observation, and literature—and whose life demonstrated that sometimes the best sea stories are written by someone who truly knows what it means to keep a ship moving.
The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.
-William McFee
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