Sailor's Hope provides a moving account of a multi-faceted man, tracking his engagement with the extraordinary changes occurring in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds in the decades after the American and French Revolutions. William Cooper was born in poverty in industrializing Scotland. Without any formal education, he worked his way up through the British merchant marine to the position of captain on voyages linking Britain with Iberia and North America.

When Cooper decided to establish a home for his family, he leased land in Prince Edward Island and named his farm "Sailor's Hope." For most of his adult life, Cooper played multiple roles - Prince Edward Island politician and legislative emissary to the UK, husband, father, farmer, merchant, miller, captain, boat builder, and amateur scientist. When his sons sought to establish themselves in life, the family built a boat and sailed from Prince Edward Island to California. Cooper, like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, inhabited a larger world than that encompassed by national boundaries.

Rusty Bittermann's lucid prose, skilful synthesis of sometimes fragmentary sources, and well-chosen illustrations bring Cooper's world to life.