author
Barnabas Downs
1757–1817
A sailor’s survival story from the American Revolution era, told by the man who lived through it. His short memoir turns a deadly 1778 shipwreck into a vivid first-person account of endurance, fear, and luck.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, on October 2, 1757, Barnabas Downs wrote a brief but memorable firsthand narrative about survival at sea. In his own account, he says he was raised for farm work before the Revolutionary War drew him into military service.
He is best known for A brief and remarkable narrative of the life and extreme sufferings of Barnabas Downs, Jun., published in 1786. The work recounts the wreck of the privateer brig Arnold near Plymouth Harbour during a severe snowstorm on December 26, 1778, when more than sixty people died. Downs wrote as one of the survivors, which gives the story its immediacy and emotional force.
Little else about his literary life is widely documented, but that single narrative has endured because of its plain, direct voice and its striking picture of danger in the early Atlantic world. He is generally listed as living from 1757 to 1817.