author

Charles W. (Charles Walter) Livermore

1830–1889

Best known for a curious slice of New England history, this 19th-century writer is remembered for a brief work about the wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk off Cape Cod. Surviving records suggest he lived from 1830 to 1889 and was buried in Providence, Rhode Island.

1 Audiobook

Ye antient wrecke—1626 : Loss of the Sparrow-Hawk in 1626. Remarkable preservation and recent discovery of the wreck

Ye antient wrecke—1626 : Loss of the Sparrow-Hawk in 1626. Remarkable preservation and recent discovery of the wreck

by Charles W. (Charles Walter) Livermore, Leander Crosby

About the author

Charles W. Livermore, also listed as Charles Walter Livermore, was a 19th-century American writer whose name survives mainly through Ye Antient Wrecke: Loss of the Sparrow-Hawk in 1626 (also published as The Ancient Wreck). The book, issued in 1865, retells the story of the Sparrow-Hawk shipwreck and its later discovery, drawing on an early colonial event that fascinated antiquarian readers.

Reliable biographical details about him are limited in the sources available here. Library listings connect him with that Cape Cod historical work, and memorial records identify him as born in 1830 and buried at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, after his death in 1889.

That scarcity of detail gives Livermore a slightly mysterious place in literary history: not a major public figure, but a writer whose small book helped preserve an unusual episode from early American coastal history.