C. A. M. (Charles Austin Mendell) Taber

Born in 1824 and active in New England’s seafaring world, Charles Austin Mendell Taber was an American whaling captain, poet, and nonfiction writer. Library and public-domain records identify him as the author of Rhymes from a Sailor's Journal (1873), and later works including How the Great Prevailing Winds and Ocean Currents are Produced (1882), The Coming Ice Age (1896), and The Cause of Geologic Periods (1907).

Sources on his life describe him as a whaleman connected with Acushnet, Massachusetts, and note that he went to sea young and eventually became master of the ship Millinocket. That long experience on whaling voyages seems to have shaped both sides of his writing: the verse in Rhymes from a Sailor's Journal grows out of a sailor’s firsthand world, while his later books show the same habit of observing nature closely and trying to explain large patterns in climate and the sea.

Taber died in 1911. Even from the small record that survives online, he stands out as one of those 19th-century writers whose work crossed easy categories—part mariner, part poet, part amateur scientific thinker.