THE STRUMPET SEA
. by Ben Ames Williams '10. Houghton Mifflin Cos. Boston. 338 pages. $2.50.
In the Strumpet Sea, with its melodious and meaning title, Mr. Williams has written a novel which has a rich and interesting background. Mr. Williams usually spins a plot, tosses it out to Friendship Maine, or places it carefully somewhere off the East-shore coast. He takes now and then Cambridge or a New Hampshire town. But this book is quite unlike his more recent books,—it goes directly to background, as did the novel Splendor with its excellent newspaper environment. This book has a background, in which scholarly research and painstaking efforts to bring about accuracy create reality that to my mind far outweighs the plot. The characters are out of the whaling period, Maine and New Bedford people.
The only other book that I know that this calls to mind is Moby Dick. The same painstaking attention to the technique of a ship, the geography and climatic conditions of the Marquessas in the Pacific, the effect of white men on the in- habitants of South Sea Islands—Mr. Wil- liams shows how a simple cold brought in by the missionary George Mc Ausland runs like fire through the healthy inhab- itants of the island, Gilead, who had never known such a thing before. He shows the natives' reactions to white visitors, their kindly reception of the missionary, but their hostile reception of those who came with intent to cause mischief or force them to labor in the pearl industry. Indeed, the idyllic days of the South Seas, when girls swam out to meet each ship and greeted crew and passengers with the most friendly unsophistication, might well inspire the lyric tones of Melville's Oomoo and Typee;—Civilization's response to this rather friendly and unstinted welcome was well-nigh fatal to the primitive islanders.
It is the background of island and sea, the life on the "Venturer," the descriptive technique of the whale-hunt and all the adventure of it, the battle with seas, the psychological effect of long, sea-journeys upon the crew,—these things carry above the actual plot. And since plot has been one characteristic of Mr. Williams' work that has received especial emphasis in the past, it is quite interesting to note this venture of his into a more serious field. The complication of a woman and two men,—there is a third, her husband, who is doomed to die and the reader feels it from the start,—carries on the story. But most of the interest lies in description and circumstance. One who has never written a book can not imagine the task of making every detail of a sailing vessel perfect. What unskilled novice could write such a paragraph as the following?
"Mr. Chase went to make sure all was ready forward; the anchor apeak, the rigging fair, the cat and fish tackles ready. The Sunrise was tide-rode, the light breezes on her larboard quarter. While the two ministers watched with a lively interest, topsails were set, the head-yards squared, and as the anchor came aweigh, the after yards were braced to spill the wind, the fore course filled, and the Sunrise began to go around on her keel. They followed the wind with the after yards, the mizzen topsail lifting, till she brought the breeze on her starboard quarter; and presently, yards braced, main course set and full, putting on her dress of bright new canvas like a bride to meet the bridegroom, she went to meet the welcome of the sea."
