author
Christopher Langman
Best known as the first mate who helped tell the dramatic story of the Nottingham Galley shipwreck, this early 18th-century sailor is remembered through a vivid survival narrative rather than through a well-documented personal biography. The surviving record is sparse, but his name remains closely tied to one of colonial New England’s most gripping maritime accounts.
1 Audiobook
A True Account of the Voyage of the Nottingham-Galley of London, John Dean Commander, from the River Thames to New-England
by Christopher Langman, Nicholas Mellen, sailor on the Nottingham galley George White
About the author
Christopher Langman is known chiefly from A True Account of the Voyage of the Nottingham-Galley of London, an early 18th-century narrative published with Nicholas Mellen and George White. In that account, he appears as the ship’s first mate and one of the men who challenged Captain John Deane’s version of the wreck on Boon Island off the coast of present-day Maine.
Because the historical record available online is thin, not much can be confirmed about his life outside that episode. What stands out is his role in preserving a competing eyewitness account of disaster, survival, and conflict at sea — the kind of firsthand testimony that still gives readers a sharp sense of the dangers of long-distance sailing in the early 1700s.
Today, Langman is remembered less as a conventional author than as a witness whose name became attached to a remarkable maritime document. For readers interested in shipwrecks, colonial history, and survival stories, his work offers a direct window into a brutal voyage and the arguments that followed it.