"Together with five other men, I went out on the bowsprit to stow the jib after the downhaul and sheets had been manned. The canvas was flogging so violently that the stout bowsprit whipped like a sapling . . . we hung on with every finger a fishhook as the foaming water rose up to our knees." As a young journalist in Montreal in 1911, Frederick William Wallace only dreamed of the rough and tumble seafaring life. Little did he know he would be hanging on for dear life just one year later aboard the Effie M. Morrissey somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia. Between 1911 and 1917, in the last age of unassisted sail, Frederick William Wallace made seven voyages aboard fishing schooners, and with his simple box camera, he photographed the men, the vessels and the work itself, knowing that he was capturing a century-old way of life at the moment of its passing. A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia, tells this story in more than a hundred of Wallace's breathtaking photographs and drawings, as well as M. Brook Taylor's absorbing account of the fishery and the man who documented it in such loving detail. A Camera on the Banks is the first book of historic sailing photographs published with such unity and vision. A Camera on the Banks is designed to accompany a touring exhibition of photographs by Frederic William Wallace.

A professor of history at Mount Saint Vincent University, M. Brook Taylor has become an expert in the banks fishery and schooners at the turn of the 20th century. He is the curator of an exhibition at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (Halifax, Nova Scotia) that presents Frederick William Wallace's photographs to the public for the first time. He has given lectures about Frederick William Wallace in Canada and Japan, and has been published in the Journal of Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. In A Camera on the Banks, Taylor presents the story of a fishery on the brink of change and the pioneering photojournalist who documented it so lovingly.

M. Brook Taylor's profile page

"A remarkable, sensitive biography of Wallace, a clearly presented introduction to the technicalities of dory fishing and a richly illustrated, atmospheric account of the life aboard schooners, all wrapped into one . . . I recommend it unreservedly." — International Journal of Maritime History

"A detailed, evocative and gripping description of life at sea shortly before the first world war." — Atlantic Books Today

"A lovely and loving book." — Martin Levin, Globe and Mail