TRISTRAM BENT

by Henry Barnard Safford '04, Coward McCann, New York, 311pp., $2.50.

TRISTRAM BENT is the record of an adventurer sent by a group of English Puritans to investigate the activities of the Dutch and Indians in the new land of America. Bent is a stalwart fellow who lays about him lustily more than once before his roving is over. Disguised as a Dutchman he lives in Holland, ships to the little village of Nieuw Amsterdam and on up the river to Fort Orange (later Albany). Because he is a good blacksmith the Indians capture him and keep him for a year in the stronghold of the Five Nations. After escape and long travel he joins an expedition to free two white girls from captivity. Alone he walks into the camp of the Indians, fights and kills their champion, and escapes their bonds to return with ship and crew and rescue the girls. Finally he leaves to report again to Lord Saye and his group, wins his golden-haired love, and crosses the sea once more to make his home on the lower Connecticut.

Tristram Bent is a picaresque novel. Dr. Safford has not cared to touch his book with that overplus of color that makes romance. Neither hero nor adventure nor bravery of old days interests the reader so much as the background of men acting within history. Though Bent is an agent of the English, he comes to admire some of the Dutch and see their system, and not its bosses as at fault. There is no final clash of races. Heroes, villains, breath-snatching deeds and dramatically organized plot are out. The result is a tale that undoubtedly keeps closer to actuality than the usual historic novel. It is a study and an unfalsified explanation of the troubles men met in those early days.

I recommend the book particularly to those who live along the Hudson and Connecticut and who would see their rivers when the little ships were making entrance and the great cities were no more than a palisade.