FICTION.
BLOW THE MAN DOWN.t
Mn. lout AN DAY is an American writer with a dozen or so of books to his credit, but we confess to a complete ignorance of his work until Blow the Man Down came into our hands. The title is in itself a pass- port to the goodwill of any one who loves sailing-ships and sailors, and our anticipations of a good entertainment were further heightened by the dedication, which is one of the pleasantest that we have ever read. It runs thus : " To my good friend Captain John W. Christie, British master mariner, who has sung all the shanties and has sailed all the seas." A man who can write such a dedication, which is perfect of its kind, ought, we argued, to be able to write a good book, and though such wide deductions are sometimes hazardous, we were not ;far out here. We do not know whether Mr. Holman Day has sailed all the seas, but he certainly knows all the shanties; and hailing as , he does from Maine, he has a knowledge of coasters, their skippers and their crews, of "tin-kettles" and " wind-jammers," of sea-slang and sailors' invective, that is at once extensive and peculiar. But this is only part of his admirable equipment. Like Mr Conrad, he has a deep and abiding sense—revealed alike in the dedication and in the development of his story—of the solidarity of the sea, and the essential honesty, simplicity, and chivalry of good sailormen. Captain Epps Candage, of the Polly,' and Captain Zoradus Wass, of the ,` Nequasset,' are sealed of the tribe which Mr. Conrad has immortalized in Typhoon and Chance and many another of his romances—stupid men, some of them, but as good as gold. And the irony of the situation resides in the fact—which is at the root of Mr. Holman Day's story —that these simple and ingenuous mariners are too often the servants of unscrupulous owners, transportation magnates and their sinister .understrappers ; and that in the clash between Wall Street tactics and high finance on the one side, and the plain duty of simple sailors, who have earned their masters' papers and are proud of them, ion the other, the simple sailors have too often to pay for the sharp psalms of their employers. The career of Boyd Mayo, the hero of ,the story, is one long series of mishaps and disasters into which he is imanceuvred by the chief villain of the plot, Julius Marston, a shipping ipirate of the most callous type. In an evil hour for himself, Mayo, who had captained fishermen and coasters ever since he was seventeen, -becomes captain of Marston's yacht at the age of twenty-six. And -while his owner is autocratic, arrogant, and dictatorial, Miss Alma Marston, his beautiful but equally unscrupulous daughter, throws herself at the head of the handsome young captain. The progress
',of their love-making is abruptly terminated by acute friction between Mayo and his owner, and by an extraordinary accident in which he is unintentionally abducted by a coasting schooner in such a way as to expose him to a charge of desertion. Though his reception on the Polly' is the reverse of cordial, Mayo proves her good genius when she turns turtle in a gale, and rescues the captain,
• (1) Mutant,: The Paraild Lives. Translated by E. Perrin. 10 vols. Vols. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by C. R. Haines.— QS) Ovid : Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. 2 vols. Vol. I.- (4) Plautus. Translated by Paul Nixon. 4 vols. Vol. I.—(5) Virgil. Trans- lated by H. Ruston Fairclough. 2 vols. Vol. L New volumes in the " Loeb Classical Library." London : W. Heinemann. [5.. net per vol.] • t Blow the Man Down: a Romance of the Cosset. By Holman Day. London : Hamer and Brothers. 105. net.]
his daughter, and the crew from being smothered. [Here we may note that Mr. Holman Day is careful to give us chapter and verse to prove that the incident had its parallel in fact.] Marston and his steam yacht come on the scene, but desert the shipwrecked crew with almost incredible inhumanity. Mayo then appears as the champion of some oppressed and evicted squatters on Hue and Cry Island—the victims of brutal officialism—returning to the sea only to be again the innocent agent of nefarious owners. How the Montana' was wrecked, and why Mayo disguised himself as a mulatto, and how he saved the life of the fickle Alma Marston and the odious 'Mr. Bradish with whom she had eloped, and how his duel with the pirates became more and more deadly, and how more by luck than good management he at last got the whip hand of them, and, thanks to the clandestine generosity of Polly Candage, was able to carry out a successful salvaging operation and establish himself on a sound financial basis, must be read in Mr. Holman Day's stirring pages. But just to show how well he writes we may quote the passage in which he describes " the Tavern of the Seas," the Polly,' and what her owner had to put up with :-
"Into Saturday Cove, all during that late afternoon, they came surging—spars and tackle limned against the on-sweeping pall of the gray fog—those wayfarers of the open main. First to roll in past the 'edgy portals of the haven were the venerable sea-wagons—the coasters known as the ' Apple-treers.' Their weatherwise skippers, old sea- dogs who could smell weather as bloodhounds sniff trails, had their noses in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnaoled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawseholes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuolde of sheaves and lisp of running rigging. A 'long-coast shanty explains the nickname, ' Apple-treers ' :
0, what's the use of compass or a quadrant or a log ? Keep her loan' on her mudhook in a norther or a fog.
But as soon's the chance is better, then we'll retch her off once more, Keepin' clod enough for bearings from the apple-trees ashore.' Therefore, the topsail schooners, the fore-and-afters, the Bluenose blunt-prows, came in early before the fog smooched out the loom of the trees and before it became necessary to guess at what the old card compasses had to reveal on the subject of courses. And so, along with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding- ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others ; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig in- formed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian ; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal—a picture from the past. She had an out-thrust of snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and sag of waist—all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like-the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile ; the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn off, the wood was gray and cracked. The Polly's galley was entirely hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches ; the after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast to the mere cubbies which were provided for the other fore-and-afters in the flotilla which came ratohing in toward Saturday Cove. The Polly, being old enough to be celebrated, had been the subject of a 'long-coast lyric of seventeen verses, any one of which was capable of producing most horrible profanity from Captain Epps Candage, her master, whenever he heard the ditty echoing over the waves, sung by a satirist aboard another craft. In that drifting wind there was leisure ; a man on board a lime-schooner at a fairly safe distance from the Polly found inclination and lifted his voice : Ow-w-w, here comes the Polly with a lopped-down sail, And Rubber-boot Epps is a-settin' on her rail. How-w-w long will she take to get to Boston town ? Can't just tell 'cause she's beadire up and down.'
' You think that kind o' ky-yi is funny, do you, you walnut-nosed,, blue-gilled, goggle-eyed son of a dough-faced americaneezus V bellowed Captain Candage, from his post at the Polly's wheel. Father I ' remonstrated a girl who stood in the companionway, her elbows propped on the hatch combings. Suchanguage ! You stop it I" It ain't
l half what I can do when Pm fair started,' returned the captain. ' Yon never say such things on shore." Well, I ain't on shore now, be I ? Pm on the high seas, and Pm talking to fit the occasion. Who's running this schooner, you or me 2 ' "
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