Why Go To Sea ?
Ships and Women. By Bill Adams. (Peter Davies and Lovat Dickson. 8s. Cid.) I Sailed in the Morning. By Ronald Powell. (Jarrolds. 16s.) Under Jane's Wings. By Ellen Barbara Flower. (Arnold. 16e.) " Senorita." By Henry Reynolds. (Peter Davies. 7e. &I.)
IT is one of the strangest problems of human character, why half of Mankind should feel strongly impelled to go to sea, and the other half as strongly impelled to keep away from it. Neither half can understand the other : the second finds the first lunatic, and the first finds the second just slightly subhuman.
In the fashionable ideology of today, of course, going to sea is put down in general to economic compulsion. But that is even less than a half-truth. Admitted, the mainspring of sea-borne traffic is trade. But that does not explain why. Torn, Dick and Harry should voluntarily choose to become sailors. Personally, they gain little of the wealth they carry: less, in many cases, than they could gain by loading it at the docks. Nor is one sailor in a thousand driven to the sea as the only, inescapable way of making a living. In almost every case to earn a living on shore would have been the easier part. Therefore, the unprejudiced mind can arrive at only one conclusion : going to sea is one of the arts, something done for its own sake. Commerce is the patron of the seaman, not his master. The rich merchant buys the painter's pictures, and so enables him to go on painting : the rich
Merchant builds fine "ships in which to send his goods, and so enables the seaman to go to sea. Dr. Johnson, and Mr. Van Loon, and all others of their way of thinking, are barking up the wrong tree.
All the pile of-books which I have on my table pose this problem in ...one form or another : but in interest and in articulateness one book stands out far above the rest. The story of Bill Adams is a simple one.. Born far inland in a village in Warwickshire, of the wilder sort of gentry stock, his very first sight of a ship bound him to the sea. So, as soon as might be, he was apprenticed to a Cape Homer, and for four years served his apprenticeship. An immense animal strength flowered under the forcing of the terrific hardships of the life : flowered, and then collapsed. His heart (as so often happened) was damaged : and the day his apprenticeship ended, the doctors told him that he could Sail the sea no more. The disaster of that verdict was vast : like the death of the young wife of a man who can only love Once. So for Bill Adams those four years were enshrined, and were made by the passage of time only more intolerably vivid. Now he is an oldish man ; and his memory of the sea like a bursting seed has thrust itself out through him into words. If he had remained a seaman probably he would never have written at all—there would have been no need. If his memories had escaped into words earlier and more easily, the odds are that those words, instead of being brilliant • and enthralling, would have been naive and lifeless. It is only the passage of time which turns the grain of sand in the oyster into a pearl. After all these years, the complexity and Vividness of what he has to tell has compelled him to acquire a complex and vivid technique of words.
Would it had stopped there ! Unfortunately—more especially towards the end of the book—his technique at times runs away with him. He has learnt a little too well how to build up a dramatic effect : and doing it too often, his tech- nique becomes mere trick of rhetoric, his dramatic effect degenerates into the pathetic. Therein, I am afraid, he fails, quite finally and definitely, to be a great writer. But he has given us, in this book, one of the sincerest and most exciting accounts ever written of life in the half-deck of a Cape Homer.
Ronald Powell was a laundryman, when the same itch got him. But nowadays " the steamers have our seas " ; and there were no tall ships, for him to go apprentice. So he answered an advertisement for a yacht-hand, to help bring a yacht home from Haifa; and thus found himself shipmates with the glamorous Eric Muspratt. But from Mr. Powell's account the artificial " hard-case " of today would appear to be a hollow sort of substitute for the older, natural kind. The old-time seaman was pickled in brine, not alcohol.
It was a somewhat disillusioned Mr. Powell, one feels, who left the ship's company at Malta. There after a period of semi-destitution on shore, lie was fortunate enough to get a berth on a small American yacht bound for New York.. This time she was a fine little ship : she was well found, and properly handled, and the account he gives of her ocean passage is interesting. But he has neither the experiences of a Bill Adams to relate, nor the ability in telling them. His virtues arc those of simplicity and likeableness.
Mr. Powell was a professional seaman, in that lie was (one gathers) a paid yacht hand. But Mrs. Flower, and the late Henry Reynolds, were entirely amateurs—voluntary seamen, paying for it as a desirable pleasure. What do you Economic Compulsionists make of that ? Under Jane's Wings is a pleasant, protracted sort of account of a pleasant, protracted sort of voyage down the western coasts of Europe. But Mrs. Flower, for all that she has come to sea for fun, seems still more interested in the land than the sea ; in the ports where Jane put in, rather than the passages between. Mrs. Flower went to sea, one gathers, somewhat as an alter; native to caravanning. Henry Reynolds, on the other hand, was an inveterate yachtsman of the old school, who grudged every minute in port ; and he was a very fine seaman of that kind. TechniCally this honest log has much of value for those who cruise in British coastal waters. But unfortunately Reynolds was a shocking bad writer : his elephantine excur; sions into humour are excruciating, and savour not of his hobby the sea but far more of his unloved profession—school-
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