14 MAY 1881, Page 23

A PRIVATEERING NOVEL.*

Tits author of the much-admired Wreck of the '.(itrosvenor' has written another book. This is a series of sea-fights, ending with a fire at sea, and enliveuend by a ball and a ghost- story, and will be devoured by boys and girls, and by such sailors and Marines as may be fond of story-books..

Ship carpenters, too, might enjoy little bits here and there. But a single volume is more than enough for most people, past the stage of boyhood, or, indeed, girlhood, for it is astonishing what horrors girls can enjoy and revel in, so long as they ap-

proach them only through story-books. But as for publishing the Ocean, Free-Lance in three volumes, and making believe it is a novel, it is a sheer imposition. True, the narrator—for the form is autobiographical—has a sweetheart, who appears for a page or two in the second volume, and " grapples his admira- tion with hooks of steel," and who crops up again in the third, after which only, the usual novel-interest begins. She is absolutely perfect in delicate refinement, as well as in all other qualities, but when she renews her acquaintance with our auto- biographer by describing her ship's temporary commauder

as sitting with "his legs stuck out like a pair of compasses," and "heaping, through his nose, and with his mouth full of

tobacco, every possible abuse upon the British people," we feel an unreality about her existence, and are disposed. to think that the author was himself the describer, and forgot into whose mouth he was putting the words. In the same way, we do not believe that the brave and lovely Miss Palmer really mimicked a vulgar, old Jew, before comparative strangers, in a manner that was very entertaining. The de- scription of the dress she wore—that " fitted like a glove," though " her wide sleeve slipped down below her elbow, and exposed her beautifully moulded arm, that was as white as ivory "—does not, again, impress us with the fidelity of the chronicler. No doubt, Miss Palmer is admirably adapted for a privateersman's sweetheart, considering "her coral-like ears, and her small,. red-lipped mouth, with the pearly teeth glancing like snow, and the beautiful curve of her dimpled chin, terminating in a throat of white velvet," &e. But teeth like snow- and a white-velvet throat shake one's confidence more and more in the reality of Muss Palmer ; and while we heave a melancholy sigh of regret, our passion, unlike the privateers- man's, grows calmer and calmer. We feel that she is only the necessary sweetheart of the boy's sea-story, not the heroine of a good. novel. Take, as a contrast, Mr. Russell's descrip- tions of the weather-aspects at sea, of which he is a close,. artistic, and loving student. They are very numerous at st,.

but disappear when lie n e gets, in the third volume, to the l proper and devotes himself to the hero and heroine, and to the vulgar old Jew and Jewess, the only other characters in the book, except officers and seamen. At first, these pictures charmed us greatly, and we felt that there was real genius dis- played in them ; and so there is,—but genius should know when to control itself, so as not to wear out its welcome, and be felt as a bore. What Mr. Black has done with his sea-stapes in the western islands of Scotland, Mr. Russell has done with his sketches of the various sea-aspects of the English Channel and the South Atlan- tic ; almost every effect of weather and light is photographed for us ; and though the pictures grow somewhat tiresome, yet they

are a sensible relief to the details of fighting the enemy or manoeuvring the ship. Black night, blazing noon, moonlight,. starlight, twilight, dawn—storm, calm, fog—all have their turn, and are, indeed, made vivid to any one of sufficient imagination to translate the words back into the scenes they represent. We have seldom read a more stirring description of a storm than the following (the narrator is speaking of a vessel near his own) :- " She had sunk by this time as deep as the thin white line that ran

under the gun-ports, and I was watching with a wildly beating heart and difficult breath the blood-freezing, the dismal, the most dismal spectacle of the crowds of men and women motioning to us, and shrieking in their horror as they stood, so to speak, on the very brink of the tremendous and appalling grave of boiling and roaring waters

• An Ocean Free-Lance. By W. Clark Russell. 8 vole. London : Richard Bentley' and Bon.

that was opening under their feet, when a loud shout from Shelved:a caused me to look to windward, where I beheld a monster sea—the Mont Blanc of the liquid Alps around us--a whole league long, as I should imagine, stooping its emerald-green unbroken crest as though fearful of brushing the sky, and rushing at us at the speed of a race- horse in full career. The mon had barely time to fling. themselves down upon their breasts under the weather bulwarks, when the schooner was on her beam-ends and running up the watery steep. The sensation was that of being shot by an irresistible power into the air—I moan, that one felt to be disconnected altogether from the schooner, and to be soaring alone through the gale. I never ex- perienced anything like it before nor since. Tho faculty of thinking was suspended; one could only hold on with a kind of dull amaze, and listen to the roaring, and feel the mighty upheaval and the more terrible sensation of sinking. At one moment, namely, when the schooner had been swept to the summit of this prodigious sea, she seemed to be revolving so as to bring her keel up ; a plummet dropped from the port-rail would have grounded on the starboard-

; the deck was up and down like the side of a house; another instant and she was rushing clown into the black and howling valley that was scooped out by this astonishing height of water, with her dock making a perpendicular line with the zenith in the other direc- tion. It was incredible that any fabric made by human hands could have encountered such a wave and lived through it ; yet such was our fortune, or such the buoyancy of tho beautiful vessel, that she did not ship so much as a single drop of water, though assuredly had the gigantic sea broken before it reached us, we should have been overwhelmed, and in all probability have gone to the bottom like a lump of lead.- I watched it as it rushed towards the ship ; I saw the sodden, helpless hull partially rise, as though making one struggle to let it pass under her. In an instent she was rolled completely over, and her copper bottom gleamed amid the ocean of foam that broke round and about her ; the spray filled the air ; there was just a glimpse of her dark spars lying aslant upon the water ; the monstrous sea, uniting its mountainous green ridge again where it had been divided by the hull of the ship, rolled roaring along the sea, and its gigantic form might have boon traced for miles. The great track of snow-white foam left behind was broken up by tho hurling surges, which leapt into it like a band of wolves into a sheepfold. I thought I saw the hall of the ship glancing amid the hollows, but it was only the outline of a dark wave. The ocean all that way was a blank, and every vestige of the ship and her freight of human lives had vanished. And now, as though this dreadful sacrifice had partially. propitiated the storm-fiend, the heavens in the direction whence the hurricane blew lightened into a pallid sulphur-colour, and the horizon opened A little after four bells in the afternoon this hur- ricane began to slacken its fury ; the sooty pall of cloud that was stretched like a carpet across the whole surface of the visible heavens broke up into largo masses of vapour with primrose-coloured patches between them, and anon narrow spaces of watery-blue .opened and lot down hazy beams of sunshine here and there, which touched the dark surface of the mountainous waters with a troubled yellow brightness. By four o'clock the wind had decreased to a moderate gale, and quantities of smoke-like scud were sweeping under a blue sky, marbled with small, prismatic, oyster-shaped clouds, which -were moving slowly and bodily away to the northward, athwart the course of the gale, and through which the windy sun was forcing his ardent beams, and giving a beautiful green sparkle to the tumbling sees, and a flashing whiteness to their soothing crests."

And the delicate touches—often only a few words—are as telling, and, indeed, more fascinating and beautiful, than those which describe the more awful aspects of Nature. For instance :—

" The 'Tigress was beginning to feel the faint swell running into the mouth of the river from the wider ocean beyond, and to tunable -a small surface of foam from her bows, as she ran over the light undulations. It was a glorious evening, the land a dim, delicate green away on the starboard hand, and the sun going down over our .stern, filling the water all that way with a strong yellow light, whilst to the left the sea stretched in a tremulous dark-blue surface, flaked with little spurts of foam."

Or,—

" Everybody was as quiet as death, and there was not a sound aloft, for the wind held the sails as steady as though they had been 'carved in marble, and the only audible noise was the cool tinkling of water under the bows."

Or,—

" The green seas came curling and foaming out of the fog to wind- ward, but you could not see one inch beyond the point at which their .forms grew defined, and they went combing in curves as polished as oil to leeward, vanishing instantly when they came in contact with the fog-curtain," But to appreciate such touches, and a hundred others, the cir- cumstances should be understood,—the contrast with what has gone before, or with the state of mind of the beholder ; thus, our author contrasts painfully, even horribly, the loveliness and calm and grandeur of the sea and sky with the blood and carnage, and anguish and sorrowiand revengeful and vindictive feelings that remain after an engagement. These engagements :are, of course, numerous, and only a child could enjoy their

horrors. "Hurricanes of shrieks," "carnage of the decks," " ghostly spectacle of dead, and dying, and wounded men," "shattered human remains," " dark scarlet pools," "blood streaming through the scupper-holes, and marking long dull-

red lines down the ship's side and crimsoning the green water," —such pictures are thickly strewn through these pages, and the details of the deeds which led to the conditions of things thus briefly mentioned, are still more revolting.

Our author, apparently, thinks it a pity that privateering was put a stop to, and argues that it was a cheap and immense assistance to GOvernment. For our part, we should say that, anything that fosters national hatreds and the lust of slaughter and saps the very foundations of the refinements and charities of life—however necessary we must allow its existence to be— should be controlled strictly by the most carefully-selected and absolutely responsible officers. But our author's principles, as expressed in this work, are of the usual book-of-adventure type ;

honourable, generous, and courageous, of course, to the highest degree, on unprofessional matters, but deceitful and vindictive to the enemy, and imperious and supercilious to those under command, It is scarcely worth considering the tone of a book of adventure seriously, but we certainly do not think it neigh- bourly, and still less charitable, to rake up the old ideas of the cowardice of the' French, and express so much contempt and ridicule of them, making them invariably dirty, stupid, mean, and cowardly ; and representing them as always iglu). minously defeated if they do not run away. Why, by-the-bye, do not flue nations make the hoisting of false colours, in Naval warfare, contrary to international law P No one gains by systematic deceit.

In reading these adventures, in which privateers and battle ships, merchantmen and slavers, Yankees, French, and Eng- lish, fog and darkness, fire and storm, battle and shipwreck, balls and funerals, all figure in the very brief period covered by our hero's cruise, we are taken back to our boyish days. What James and Marryat, and Melville and Kingston, and Ballan- tyne taught us, comes back once more ; but, as Mark Twain tells us of the good little boy, we do not find that Mr. Russell's adventures are according to the books. We should have thought that iu 1812 more conservative seafaring cus- toms obtained than even in the days described by the authors of our boyish tales, but we find to our surprise that in 1812 there was the port quarter and the port watch, and that they ported their helm. We had thought that this was a very modern innovation. Then, Mr. Russell has no villain in the forecastle to foment mutiny ; ou the contrary, every one of the ninety seamen and all' the four mates and thi captain are most faithful and trusty and moral men ; an many of them weep copiously at the thought of relatives, o, even from the mere excitement of their nervous system. and the captain does not sneer at ghosts, but has seen then himself. And we never heap• even of a cat or of irons ; there no blessing, or otherwise, of the eyes by Mr. Russell's sailors. " Jack tars " have all died out. No one " spins a yarn." " Aye, aye, sir," is never once shouted. Scuppers are only mentioned in their matter-of-fact sense, and "lee scuppers " are not once hinted at. As for the big, big D and the dash, we look in vain for these old and numerous acquaintances ; and, worst of all, they never " go off on the larboard tack" or "haul to windward on a bowline." We breathe cheerfully again, however, when we find sharks making short work of the second mate,—this is some- thing like old times ; and it is quite according to the books that the hero and his sweetheart should be picked up iu their open boat by the very ship that contained her venerable old father, Colonel Palmer ; so that, as soon as the hero comes out of his long swoon, the handsome old man lays his hands on the young people, and blesses them, But oh ! the selfishness of successful love—the unnatural conclusion ! Contrary to all the authori- ties, the hero never once remembers the dear old Tigress' and Captain Shelvocke; and their fate, after parting, is not only not cleared up, bUt not one scalding tear is shed to their memory,—their names are never heard.