Hit the Deck!: A Memoir of an Apprentice Boy

These incredible memoirs began in 1899 by 15 year-old Gaither "Steve" Stevens soon after he joined the Navy as an Apprentice Boy. It was a different world and a different Navy. His extraordinary experiences were captured in a typed manuscript kept safe and unpublished until now. In these writings, you'll find adventures of a lifetime highlighting encounters with a grizzly bear, bar fights, a train robbery, murder, boxing, fiestas, abduction as a sex slave, turtle races, wild shipmates, an Eskimo prostitute, and other savory scenes. Gaither's chronicles of fellow "blue-jackets" and places he visited are wonderous, humorous, and heart-warming, which he wrote from the innocence and naivety of a young man. This wild rollercoaster reveals life in a nearly forgotten time that produced some of the Navy's finest men.