Shipmanship
Of Ships and Men. By Alan Villiers. (Newnes, 30s.)
EVEN if the seas make you puke, and you abhor anthologies, you may without much trepidation embark with Alan Villiers. Yet all you who turn the wheel and look to windward, to say nothing of you who like larking about in rather smallish boats, should be warned that he carries a pretty mixed cargo, and that some- times, in the shallows, she's a mere dredger, dragging up a good deal of old hat. Say you're a Conrad fan. Should you be delighted, or not, to find all those purple passages from (yes, neglected because of a dirty word in the title?) The Nigger of the Narcissus? Again, take the verse. We have some smash poets writing about the sea nowadays—Murphy, Singer, etc.—but here we get nothing younger than the Poet Laureate: 'I must go down to the seas again . . ."Toll for the brave . . ."Drake he's in his hammock . . ."Blow the man down . . etc. No matter. We don't have that hymn; and we do have A shipman was there,.hailing from the West: For aught I know he was from Dartemouth- He knew well all the havens, as they were, From Gotland to the Cape of Finistere.
And Alan Villiers is indeed a true Geoffrey Chaucer to our times. At the beginning of the century, as a boy, be got to know the ropes by hanging about the Melbourne waterfront, pick-i ing up odds and ends by watching the wind- jammers in .harbour and by browsing the quay-. side bookstalls. Thereafter he sailed the world in any craft that would float, at last command- ing not only D-Day landing craft but the photo- genic square-rigs seen in Why Dick and Billy Budd. Out of such experience he's able to bring a sudden illumination to even the most familiar texts in his cabin. `They strake sail, and so we were driven,' wrote St. Paul, and then 'they cast four anchors from the stern.' A man who spent a twelvemonth sailing Kuwait dhows knows why. And why the Shipmaster in The Tempest yells to the Bo'sun, 'fall to it yarely': because the author sailed the Mayflower, 1957. The book is the log of an exhilarating personal voyage. Yet it's only intermittently biographical, revealing a brave and modest character of many parts. The off-beat prose items shed new light on the Bounty adventure, the Titanic disaster, the singular heroisms of the last war, the pleasures of sailing in general. The photographs are a joy.
HUGH GORDON PORTEUS
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