THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOHN NICOL, MARINER,
with a Foreword and Afterword by Alexander Laing '25, with illustrations by Gordon Grant. Farrar and Rinehart. p. 214. $4.00.
Alexander Laing introduces his good friend John Nicol to an audience that never knew the original edition of his story published in 1822. He is a sturdy champion of the old seaman's virtues, with a scholarship as warm as it is thorough. Despite a century of neglect, Nicol has been handsomely treated by editor and publisher, as he was originally by his collaborator, John Howell. This amazing bookseller, improver of false teeth, and experimenter with flying machine and submarine, found the feeble old fellow picking up bits of coal in the streets, and took down his story. It is still his odyssey, refined and shaped and simplified, as the old sagas, by frequent retelling. Mr. Laing's claims are not exaggerated, for the prose stands equal to that of any voyage literature I have read between Pigafetta's account of Magellan's circumnavigation and Melville's Typee, always excepting certain sections in great Hakluyt. It is without the shoddy elegance of many a writer embalmed by English departments, and without the unsifted detail which burdens the practical man's "round unvarnish 'ed tale" or even Cook's splendid second volume.
Nicol was a young Scotch cooper who had read Robinson Crusoe. When he was twenty-one he took to sea as "Bungs" and went through our American Revolution in the King's pay. Seven years of that service and he entered the Greenland whale fishery. After being frozen in, in the Arctic ice, he thawed out in the Indies. Eager to see the great globe, he shipped for a voyage of discovery and trading that took him to the Sandwich Islands, the northwest coast of America, to China, and so home. The most moving of all his chapters recounts his voyage as steward on a vessel that was transporting 245 female convicts to New South Wales. His simple, sincere love for one of the convicts, who bore him a son on the voyage out, serves as suspense through the voyages he made in vain effort to get back to her. Twice he doubled Cape Stiff hoping somehow to find her and their son, but the years passed, and, his second China passage over, he was impressed. Seven years he served against the French in a succession of ships. Finally he returned after 25 years of far wandering to the Edinburgh he had so constantly loved of all places of the earth. Though he married and set up in trade, fear of the press gang drove him into obscurity, and poverty and fatigue made him a poor old man with no hope but a final berth for the last voyage out.
I have been a wanderer, and the childof chance, all my days; and now only lookfor the time when I shall enter my last ship,and be anchored with a green turf upon mybreast; and I care not how soon the comviand
is given. Nicol was no ordinary tarry breeks. He had a free, curious mind above the prejudices of race and color. He esteemed the negro slaves of the Indies and learned what he could of the language of "that endearing place," the Hawaiian Islands. He had an eye for color and strangeness and a heart to respond to joy or misery. Though verbal narration two decades after the end of his wanderings leaves his account lacking in the detail a scholar searches, he is an ideal companion for us armchair adventurers.
Mr. Laing follows Nicol's autobiography with an informative essay on the personal narratives of ordinary seamen, of which he holds this the first example pure of motives other than entertainment. His suggestions of other'titles are there for the curious, for even in mystery stories his wide reading searches out strange new material.
The Life and Adventures of John Nicol,Mariner is a find for the bewildered giver of gifts. It is a good story in a great tradition, it is handsomely printed in bold type, it is bound in sail cloth, and each of its fourteen chapters is headed with a spirited pen drawing by Gordon Grant. Some lover of the splendid gesture should drop a copy to Davy Jones's locker where surely Nicol still spins his yarn among his splendid peers. ALLAN MACDONALD.
Public Utilities for October 22 contains an article Private offerings and sales of utilities securities by Lawrence W. Lougee '29.
Digest of Public General Bills with Index. Congress second session, prepared by the Legislative Reference Serviceof the Library of Congress was prepared largely by Wilfrid C. Gilbert '14.
R. H. Colley '09 and C. H. Amadon are the authors of Relation of penetration anddecay in creosoted southern pine poles which appears in the Bell System Technical Journal for July.
Ski Tracks edited by Charles and Percy Olton, published by William Morrow andCompany has a foreword by Charles N. Proctor '29. This book contains several illustrations of Dartmouth skiers.
Edward B. Stanford '31 has prepared a Library Handbook for the Williams College Library. This has been published in an attractive format as a pamphlet of 20 pages.
Pressure groups and propaganda by Harwood L. Childs '19 appears as one of the chapters in The American politicalscene published by Harper and Brothers.Lactones in liquid ammonia by J. W. E. Glattfeld '07 and Duncan Macmillan has been reprinted from the Journal of theAmerican chemical society for June 1936. In the Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1936, there is an article on Samuel Stone, 1602-63, by Franklin T. Nichols '31.
W. E. Flannery '29 is the author of an article entitled The Rupture of abdominalwounds and the strength of healingwounds which appears in the September issue of The Eclectic Medical Journal.Cod Liver Oil, a five-year study of itsvalue for reducing industrial absenteeismcaused by colds and respiratory diseases by Arthur D. Holmes 'O6 and others has been reprinted from the July issue of IndustrialMedicine.
Taxable Income by Roswell Magill '16 published by the Ronald Press Company will be reviewed in a later issue.
