Alan Villiers

The Last of the Wind Ships

A tribute to the last days of the great merchant sailboats and their crews from a unique photographic talent.

The photographic work of Alan Villiers is arguably the most important photo-historical record of early-twentieth-century maritime history in the world. In capturing on film life aboard the last of the great merchant sail ships, he has provided us with a singular record of the end of an era.

Passionate about the sea from an early age, Villiers worked on several commercial sailing vessels before taking on a job as a journalist on a whaling expedition to Antarctica in 1923, which ultimately resulted in the writing of his first book. Other acclaimed books would follow (as well as one film). These powerful images, published for the first time in this volume, date from the late 1920s through the 1930s and were taken aboard the three ships Villiers worked on during this period: the Herzogin Cecilie, the Grace Harwar, and the Panama. 140 duotones.