I thought of Parlier too. But I wonder if all the idiots of the past get forgotten, while the great mariners are remembered. So we compare the idiots of today, with the great mariners of the past. I recall Slocum described a bunch of duffers he encountered on the coast of Queensland who...
Peer to peer can be about as informative as watching a pissing contest, unless you really know what questions to ask, and which answers to believe. The advantage of books (at least in the days before self-publishing) is that a lot of the chaff was filtered out and the rest was organized into a...