March 4/2026: In July of 1880 or ’82, a young African-American boy named William Golden (he would later often give his surname as Golding) was loitering about the waterfront in Savannah, Georgia, with a young cousin. The two boys were admiring a three-masted barkentine named Wandering Jew, when the captain and his wife called out to them from the quarterdeck. William was somehow lured aboard.
‘They took me down in the cabin and made much of me,” he later wrote. “But when I wanted to go back ashore I found that I could not for the very reason that I was out at sea about 45 or 50 miles offshore.”
Young William, then just around seven years old, served as a cabin boy aboard Wandering Jew, by his account. He went on to spent most of the next 50 years of his life working at sea aboard various vessels—merchant ships, whaling ships, U.S. Navy warships, and at least one private yacht.
“In all that time since I left home I have been all over the world,” he wrote, “from North, South, East, and West and plenty of ports in the Seven Seas from England to China, Japan, India, Australia, Africa, West Indies, Central America, South America, around Cape Horn 23 times, Cape of Good Hope 25 or 30 times. … All that time I never accumulate any fortune but hard knocks, hardships and a lots of experience.”
By the mid-1920s, William Golding was suffering from chronic bronchitis and was forced to swallow the anchor. He ultimately landed as an invalid in the U.S. Marine Hospital back home in Savannah, where during the 1930s he started creating art. Urged on by a wealthy patron, Margaret C. Stiles, he produced more than 130 drawing pencil and crayon drawings. There was a small market for these even in his lifetime, and now examples can be found in the collections of several museums.
I discovered Golding at the Jepson Center and Telfair Children’s Art Museum in Savannah, during a recent visit there.
As you can see from these examples, Golding depicted what he knew. The vessels he encountered and the places he had visited. His images obviously are not visually accurate representations, but are rather highly idealized through a matrix of memory and imagination. Still, the details, particularly as to vessels, are meticulous.
Be sure to check out Golding next time you are in Savannah. Meanwhile, you can purchase this very cool book depicting his art and telling his story right here!
The Art of William O. Golding
By Harry DeLorme
Telfair Books (2022)
143 pp.
Quando ti svegli ti prego chiamami