CLIPPER SHIP MEN

by Alexander Laing'25, 'Duett, Sloan and Pearce, 1944, 279 pp.,$3.00.

Clipper Ship Men is a new kind of book on ships. The literature of the subject is apt to divide extremely into romantic splurge over names and top hamper or fact-heavy pedantry. This is the sustained essay of a large mind regarding men, circumstances, and ships as they come together in the ultimate wind ship. For Mr. Laing the clipper was the supreme act of imagination which could have come into being only when, for a few years, artist, scientist, merchant, and sailor acted together. Thus his book is a study of men and their machines with implications which far outreach any particular era or narrow subject.

Anyone who has read The Sea Witch—and if one hasn't let him get a copy of that bookknows Mr. Laing's rare ability to clarify the technical. Here is the whole history of ship design, the technicalities of weather gage, speed, dead rise, tonnage rates made clear and significant in the shaping of the ships which were the true and beautiful product of man's history on the sea.

Here are also the great designers, Griffiths, Webb, McKay, but, to the delight of his admirers, here is even more of Capt. Nat Palmer, who as a twenty-year-old boy discovered the Antarctic in a 47-foot sloop and later became one of the important shapers of the packet and clipper hulls which made America for the first time the land of speed.

Clipper Ship Men is a very attractive book in format with dust wrapper, end papers and many illustrations by Armstrong Sperry. They give decorative quality, but are primarily and rightly an aid in visual understanding.

Though men interested in the sea will most welcome this book, its broad and searching approach will engross any one curious of those rare creations in which science, utility, and beauty are one.