Sag Harbor’s whaling era is a storied one, to say the least.
Over the last two centuries or so, many a writer has used the port town with a past as the backdrop for their respective works. Last month, at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, East End frequenter and author Susan McGuirk released her first novel, Dear Missing Friend — a work of historical fiction centered around a love story which occurred during the Sag Harbor Whaling times, and specifically, one that touches McGuirk on a personal level.
(Photos by Rossa Cole)
“My family came over from Ireland to Sag Harbor in the early 1840s,” McGuirk, a Manhattan resident who for 30 years had a house in Quogue, says. “I was reading about my great aunt and found out she married a whaler who was also Irish. There weren’t a lot of them [Irish people] but there were some and somehow, they lost each other, and then in doing the research, I found a letter that he published.”
Inspired by an advertisement placed in the Missing Friends column, syndicated in newspapers across the country and heavily read by Irish people who were trying to find lost friends, relatives and loved ones, McGuirk began her journey into the story of how a Sag Harbor whaler was searching for his wife Catherine, who, as it turns out, was McGuirk’s second great-aunt.
After 10 years of research and writing, pouring through whaling logs, ship manifests, passenger lists, census records, marriage and death records and newspapers, McGuirk was able to confirm information about her familial history.
“Four years later, he still hadn’t found her. So, I thought, ‘oh my god, was she dead, or did she not want to be found, or why didn’t she want to be found?’ That’s how the whole thing started,” McGuirk says. “It’s all based on these real people and the things, the places they went, and the things they did. But I filled in all the in between with fiction.”
McGuirk was selected to appear in Author’s Night with the East Hampton Library and the book is already listed as #1 on Amazon for epistolary fiction.
