Joseph C. Lincoln quotes:

My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in everyday life.

New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. [...] It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle.

But very unfortunately the merchant marine died away till even the majority of fishing done about the Cape is in the hands of the Portuguese who emigrated to the Cape some fifty years ago.

My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.

That was in the days when everyone rode a bicycle, and the journal had a circulation of over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, so my verses and illustrations became known to a fairly large public.

At that moment Mr. Clifford, quite unconscious that he and his most personal feelings and aspirations were subjects of discussion, was turning from the main road into the lower road.

Whether the type of old sea captain that I have portrayed in my stories is gone forever, is a question. Certainly each summer I find that the ranks have perceptibly thinned. The longshore captain is still there, many of the men who are not any older than myself, but their viewpoint is not that of a man who sailed his square rigged ship out one morning with China as his destination.