MATTHEW EARLY.
By Alexander Laing '25. New York: Due 11, Sloan and Pearce, 957. 372PP. $4.95.
Alex Laing's new book is a historical novel and a sea "roamance." Laid in a little-known time, circa 1800, the story begins in a prim and practical Rhode Island seaport and voyages into many vivid unfamiliar places: into the brilliant if shallow society of London; into the slave marts of Jamaica; into the opium trade of Calcutta; into the protection racket of the Barbary Coast pirates; into the struggles of a young republic, brash, proud, lacking finance or a navy, to stand clear of the gigantic conflict between England and France.
Slavery is the theme, however, according to the book's dedication. The slave trade is still a profitable one and there are only the first stirrings of protest to be heard on either side of the Atlantic. Yet the subject is much broader than the simple question of merchandising pigmented skins:
"Watch out, Matthew Early," his employer says, a sharp-eyed Yankee merchant. "We're all born slaves, eh? The good Lord gives some of us the gumption to free ourselves before long - from some of it. But there's more kinds of slavery than the sort they make the to-do over. What about slavery to a woman?"
Capt. Early comes to count among his shackles those screwed on by two women: one by Barbara, an early abolitionist in New England, a partly emancipated Puritan who believes in an ideal too much to be a woman; one by Leonora, lissome huntress of London aristocracy who lives too much a woman to know an ideal.
The ultimate bondage of Matthew Early, however, is his own nature:
"I am the one," he recognizes, after the disaster in Jamaica, "who comes late - and good men die because of it."
The author permits himself a nice titular irony over this: not only is the Captain late in learning, but his given name comes from the apostle who had been a tax collector for the successful merchants of Rome.
If the New-port captain is slow to comprehend, after sailing more than 30,000 sea miles, what then should be said of his society, 157 years later?
