Lounging in summer; laboring on the sea

Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age, 1860-1900
By David L. Richards
University Press of New England/University of New Hampshire, 336 pp., illustrated, paperback, $24.95

Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort
By Karen Christel Krahulik
New York University, 276 pp., illustrated, $29.95

Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail
By Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh
Yale University, 336 pp., illustrated, $35

The summer resort as a ''social mecca" provided ''the people of progress with a grand new stage where they could preen, promenade, party, play, and perform."

Sounds like a good description of Provincetown, but the words are those of David L. Richards describing Poland Spring, Maine, in its Gilded Age heyday.

Two summer-season books, Richards's anecdote-rich account of a vanished era at Poland Spring (''Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age, 1860-1900") and Karen Christel Krahulik's engaging social history of Provincetown (''Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort"), explore the not always differing resort lifestyles.

Poland Spring was the creation of the entrepreneurial Ricker family, several of whose members had claimed cures of various ailments from the waters bubbling from an underground spring.

Progress did the rest, writes Richards, a Northwood University librarian, with the advance of railroad lines and the creation of the era's ''status-conscious and anxious group" who welcomed ''the opportunity to vacation with like-minded and -mannered members of the upper middle class."

Its fashionable years ended with the Great Depression, but after an unlikely stint as a Job Corps training site in the 1960s -- and the burning of its landmark buildings in the mid-1970s -- Poland Spring has been reborn as a resort where today, as its website avows, as in its gilded past, ''you will meet some of the nicest people anywhere."

Krahulik, who teaches women's studies at Duke University, is a knowledgeable guide to P'town's gay scene, but she has also absorbed the heritage of the Portuguese fishing families, the early artist colonies, and the ''wash-ashores" -- the locals' term for those who come for a brief vacation but stay on as residents.

Then there were the sailors, for the harbor was home to much of the Navy's North Atlantic Fleet during both world wars. As Krahulik writes, that ''meant that hundreds of sailors were strolling the streets and innumerable visitors were going to Land's End to meet or, perhaps, have sex with them" -- a connection that provides an exuberant ''buddy-buddy-shipmate!" testimonial from playwright Tennessee Williams.

As one who clearly thrives in today's P'town, Krahulik is concerned that it ''is a fantasy many will never realize because they don't have the means to get to or stay at Land's End, and, once there, they have few ways to engage politically with local residents or other tourists."

Shifting the focus from destination to vocation, Ashley Bowen was 11 when he went to sea out of Salem in 1739, on a ship headed for Spain. After diversions to North Carolina and then to England because of that intriguingly named War of Jenkins's Ear, Bowen arrived back home in Marblehead just six months past his 12th birthday.

''At an age when most of his friends would have been punting around the harbor at home," writes maritime historian Daniel Vickers, ''he had gained a year of real seafaring experience."

Younger than most of them, perhaps, but only by a few years, as Vickers details in his illuminating social history of young seafarers, ''Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail," from the earliest days into the mid-19th century.

Vickers, now a history professor at the University of California, San Diego, writes that it was while teaching in Newfoundland for 15 years that he encountered ''a large body of people who saw nothing unusual in maritime labor."

In maritime societies like Salem's, Vickers writes, ''going to sea was not a matter of individual choice as much as a local expectation. . . . Young men grew up in the company of older youths who regularly shipped themselves abroad, and it was only normal to follow in their wake."

An unexpected appeal is Vickers's account of life for young, single seafarers. He writes, ''they divided their time . . . between sea and shore: sailing abroad, fishing on the banks, doing odd jobs around the waterfront, helping out their parents, and killing time when the work dried up."

And beyond that, he writes, seafaring was very much a young man's occupation, as ''most who had shipped themselves before the mast at age twenty had vanished from the forecastle by thirty." At least a quarter died at sea, another quarter were promoted to master or mate, and a percentage that would have increased by age went to work in shoreside industries.

Vickers notes that most readers' understanding of seafaring life comes from the writings of 19th-century seagoing authors like Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville, drawn to the sea by ''the very strangeness of the deep, the unusual ways of the ship, and the seemingly outlandish manners of the men who now chose this manner of life."

What Vickers does most satisfactorily in ''Young Men and the Sea" is show us that ''through most of America's age of sail, maritime labor was not all that exceptional. In Salem it was simply what young men did when they grew up alongside the sea."

Michael Kenney writes every other month about new books of regional and local interest.