Faith lends nobility to the savagery
Philip Glazebrook
DESPERATE JOURNEYS, ABANDONED SOULS by Edward Leslie
Macmillan, .£/6.95, pp.586
Edward Leslie's compilation of stories of shipwreck, marooning, calamity and survival makes enthralling reading on
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every page. We are led into depths of misery and despair, and are shown feats of endurance and courage, which seem de- signed to display every facet and capability of the human spirit with the thoroughness of one of those mediaeval compendiums of fabulous and magical adventures which were put together in order to explore and exhaust every possibility of man's be- haviour.
The reader's attention is caught and held from the first page by two related factors: Mr Leslie's fascination with his subject, and his exceptional narrative gift. Time and again, having embarked with some doomed crew, he recounts their adventures with a freshness and an enthusiasm (not to say a lapse into theatricality now and then) which keeps the reader buoyant through a succession of sinkings and other catas- trophes which might, in less talented hands, have become by repetition rather tiresome. This they never are. A breathless narrative carries the figures through their ordeal, or describes how they succumb, whilst every question we might wish to ask about them and their circumstances has been answered by Mr Leslie's thorough research into all contingent matters. What happened to Alexander Selkirk when he got home to Scotland from the adventure which inspired Robinson Crusoe? Where did Coleridge's idea for The Ancient Mariner come from? How many men survived in that boat going off at a tangent to the lifeboat which our story follows? Mr Leslie's interest in his subject, allied to his gift for transferring vivid and terrible scenes into his reader's mind, means that he has foreseen and pondered most ques- tions which these scenes raise, and has made enquiries producing illuminating answers.
Such intense and extended interest as Mr Leslie's — for the book seems to be the outcome of many years' work — carries with it the dangers which beset an obses- sion. One such danger is that the author cannot always see the wood for the trees. Shape and form is lost by overstuffing. Purpose and direction are forgotten. After 140 pages of his book's final section headed `Risk and Recreation' — Mr Leslie admits that `there is no end to stories such as these. They just go on and on.' They do rather, and to have included so much anecdotal material from 'leisure accidents' weakens the impact of the book, whose strength is in its accounts of the calamities of an earlier age. No doubt for the victim it is as nasty to fall off a racing multi-hull into
the 20th-century sea as it was for Jonah to fall into that ancient ocean as he fled from the hand of God towards Tarshish; but there is a kind of want of resonance about modern accidents — a lack of allegorical content — which makes this book, begun amongst heroic catastrophes, appear to peter out into the mishaps of pygmies. Perhaps Mr Leslie suspected this himself, for he asserts on the very last of his 586 pages (atrociously printed in China, by the way) that 'if this book is about anything, it is about the betrayal of trust and the prospects of a kind of secular redemption', as if he feared that his intention had been overwhelmed by his matter.
There is no doubt that the dignity and nobility with which the early sufferers impress the reader is due in large part to their interweaving of their Christian faith with the awful elements of their ordeal. Rescuers terrified by the appearance of a poor maroon of the 16th century — too terrified to take him aboard — return to the shore when they hear him recite the Creed. A 17th-century seaman with 'a lingering view of approaching death' com- poses his mind to God's will by recalling `the many miraculous acts of God's Provi- dence towards me'. An 18th-century cap- tain rescued from ghastly horrors drops to his knees and, propped against a hen-coop, prays 'with sincerest gratitude to the Great Author of all things for the abundance of his mercy'.
It is in their submission to God's will that these men appear noble-spirited. Later comes into the stories another use of piety, as a contrivance for retrospectively bless- ing whatever foul means have been used for survival. Thus a survivor of the rugby- team plane crash in the Andes says, 'If Jesus offered his body and blood to all disciples he was giving us to understand we must do the same'; and a certain Ann Saunders, obliged by hunger to devour her fiancé's body and drink his blood, wrote afterwards of her actions, 'Oh, this was a • bitter cup indeed! But it was God's will that it should not pass me — and God's will must be done'. It is of course impertinent for those who have not suffered such an ordeal to say that eating people is wrong and this 'survival cannibalism' seems al- ways to have been a 'custom of the sea' but the reader will notice that the change of emphasis, from humility towards self- justification, diminishes the stature of these later survivors by comparison with their forerunners. A man who fought a shark in the Pacific in 1942 with amazing courage attributes his survival to his belief that 'the human body is a wonderful mechanism' when it is perfectly clear that it was his very much more wonderful spirit which supported his body's mechanism through the shark's repeated attacks.
No doubt sailing-ships instilled into their seamen an attitude of humility towards providence which the captain of the Titanic liked to think he had outgrown. The old seafarers, too, in these stories, were often consciously seeking adventure — were 'impatient of seeing what might further gratify my curiosity' as one of them ex- pressed it — which a conscripted soldier flung into a shark-infested sea by the accident of war was not. Aware of the hand of God, driven by that active curiosity which has so often been fatal to travellers, the histories of men such as Byron and Dampier, and many others in this book, are a$ much the stuff of fabulous adventure as the wanderings of Ulysses. It is with a sense of bathos, after marvelling at these heroes, that we come in modern times to the story of 'The Maine Tarzan', a fraudu- lent 'survivor' who was at last unmasked and fined 205 dollars for having made a fire in the woods without a licence. Still, the trickster too has his place in allegory, and it is in his diligent assembling and juxtapos- ing of so much material, never mind the book's shape or purpose, that Mr Leslie has produced such an admirable work.
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