25 APRIL 1908, Page 10

LIFE ON THE OCEAN.

Life on the Ocean. By George Little. (Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. 6s.)—This is a republication of the seafaring adventures of an American of nearly a century ago. As Mr. W. Clark Russell says in his introduction, "to the marine archaeologist this Life on the Ocean must prove extremely interesting." Few modes of life can have undergone such a radical change in so short a time as that of the sailor. Then the 'Mauretania' and Lusitania' were undreamt-of possibilities, and the sailor's life was one of adventure and excitement always at the mercy of the varying moods of Nature instead of the present life of monotone= routine on the machine-conquered ocean. George Little wrote of his experiences in a simple, straightforward, naive, almost Puritanical style which seems wonderfully refreshing after the modern journalistic fluency. There is an old-fashioned flavour about the book, full though it is of thrilling adventure with pirates and cannibals, storms and tempests, fightings and imprisonments, which gives us a strikingly convincing picture of that life on the ocean which filled our grandfathers with the wild longing to run away to sea.