Hi, I'm Christian Williams and it's the 2019 holiday gift-giving season, and I
recommend giving books--so this year let's go over a few sailing novels.
We've already treated probably the best contemporary novelist of our time,
Patrick O'Brien, and I dare not even mention "Moby Dick," the great piece of
literature that confounds every attempt to compete with it, or even my own book,
my own new novel, "Rarotonga," which is just out a month ago. I'll put those in
the description and the links at the end of this video. But, you know, something has
changed in the books that we read about sailing and the sea. They're mostly
nonfiction now, I think because the adventures that we follow today in the
news and on television are quite different than they were at the heyday
of the imaginative story, whereas everybody goes off adventuring now with a GoPro
camera, people are quite literate, they keep notes, in many cases they are
sponsored, and the result is an almost endless stream of true adventure stories.
But the non-fiction books that we read by the hundreds, leave something out, and
that is the imaginative capacity and capability of a novelist taking on the
same subjects. And at the turn of the century, nearly a hundred and twenty
years ago, this was the stock and trade of communication, and I have four to recommend.
The first is Joseph Conrad's "Typhoon." This book is "Typhoon" and other
tales, it also includes several other good short stories.
But the story "Typhoon" has always been a favorite of mine. It's about
Captain MacWhirr
a rather stolid man, unimaginative, who is the captain of a
pretty beat-up freighter crossing the China Sea with a cargo of 200 "Chinamen."
Yes, "coolies." All four of these books were
written about 1900, and they they have the assumptions and attitudes of the
time, which personally as a reader I accept, as, you know--it's their Geist,
their spirit of their time, and we can learn from it without imitating it .
In any case, those "Chinamen" present quite a problem to a ship at the height of a
typhoon and Conrad is very clever about describing how this unimaginative
captain pulls through. There's a terrifying scene in it, at least for me.
They think they've gone through the worst of the typhoon because the sun
came out and the winds dropped down, and Captain MacWhirr turns to his mate and says,
The the worst is yet to come. Of course, on the other side of the cyclone.
"Typhoon," by Joseph Conrad. Another classic which I was unfamiliar
with until last year, of the period, is Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands,
a Record of Secret Service." For some reason everybody read this book, had
read this book, but me. "Vibrant, impassioned, witty, intelligent and
shamelessly prejudiced in the manner of the day." Well, they're all like that.
I wasn't entirely persuaded by the spy aspect of "The Riddle of the Sands" by
Erskine Childers, what I liked was something completely unfamiliar to me,
which is that this story takes place in a 30-foot boat with bilge keels --you know,
so that it can sit upright when the tide goes out--in an area of the world that
our European friends probably are very familiar with but I'm not, and that is
the the tidal sands off the great estuaries at about the intersection of
Holland and Germany, just south of what used to be
called Schleswig-Holstein I guess, they're these big rivers like the Elbe,
they're estuaries and they go into the North Atlantic there and form vast sand banks
that go out ten miles offshore, so that you can anchor 10 miles offshore, off the
Frisian Islands, and when the tide goes out, as this book describes, for as far
as the eye can see there are nothing but sand banks. And you can navigate these
channels if you know just where they lay, which just might be
important in wartime, or so Carruthers and Davies, the heroic occupants of this
this leaky 30-foot boat hope to discover for their Secret Service end.
Well, "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson is supposed to be a children's
book of course, and there are more children among us than we thought if
that's true. Because I reread this last year on a long car trip in which I was
alone and was completely charmed once again. You know, this is the introduction
to the world by Robert Louis Stevenson of Long John Silver and the stories told
through the eyes of young Jim, and he happens to come into possession of very
important information about the treasure map and here's how here's how he does it--
by falling into an apple barrel. "I got bodily into the apple barrel and
found there was scarce an apple left but sitting there in the dark
what with the sound of the waters and the rocking movement of the ship
I had either fallen asleep or was at the point of doing so when a heavy man sat
down with rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned his shoulders
against it and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was
Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words I would not have shown
myself for all the world, but lay there trembling and listening in the extreme
of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives
of all the honest man aboard depended upon me alone."
Now, these guys knew how to tell a story. "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson.
"Captains Courageous" by Rudyard Kipling, another book written about in
about 1900 we've all heard of, but if you haven't reread it lately it will bring a tear to your eye.
"Captains Courageous," I don't have the book with me,
is as you probably recall the story of young Harvey, who's about 15, who falls off an
ocean liner and is rescued by a Gloucester fisherman skippered by one
Disko Troop, one of the coolest guys in the history of the sailing literature
and and here is the introduction to here's the introduction to Harvey.
"He was dressed in a cherry colored blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings and
bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of his head.
After whistling between his teeth as he eyed the company of men aboard the steamship he said in a
high, loud voice, "Say, it's thick outside! You can hear them fish boats squawking
all around us. Say, wouldn't it be great if we ran one down!"
Well, it's after that that he falls overboard into the clutches and the rescue of one of those
Gloucester fishers. "Captains Courageous" is a wonderful book. It's also a
sensationally good movie, to the highest standards, made by Victor Fleming,
directed by Victor Fleming, with Spencer Tracy as Manuel, and it contains -- that is,
"Captains Courageous" the movie--real footage of Gloucester fishing schooners
in action on the Grand Banks and
especially of their their race home to the Gloucester at the end of the story.
Now, nonfiction books still dominate, and I thought to bring along this year four
that you might not have heard about, and the first of these is
a book I was introduced to only five or six years ago by my friends
in the Pacific Northwest called "The Curve of Time" by M. Wiley Blanchet, or
however she pronounces it. Written in 1927. Blanchet is a woman who moved
to Vancouver, and they had a 25-foot motorboat and her husband went
off on it one day and never came back. He drowned. Nobody knows why.
They had five children. Instead of selling the boat, which I think most people would do out of grief,
she took her five children for the next 15 years, six of them on this
boat, and lived for months at a time in summers exploring British Columbia
in the 1920s. She's a wonderful writer, evocative, not sentimental, and the things
she puts her five children through -- and they do it without complaint -- are
extraordinary. They're cold all the time, their anchor often slips, they go
off hiking to visit hermits, they discuss with some alacrity and period
sensibilities the Indians of the time. British Columbia's changed entirely
since then and this book is a wonderful evocation of what it was like before
civilization really got its grip. "The Curve of Time" by M. Wiley Blanchet.
Of nonfiction books, curiously, "Two Years before the Mast," very well-known, but for
some reason A half-dozen of my friends reported reading this again within the
last couple of years. It's by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and as you recall
he was a college student at Harvard at the time
and I think he was diagnosed with bad eyesight and they said you need a sea
voyage young man. So he signed on before the mast on a ship that collected skins
off of the California coast. And it's true that the people I'm citing who've
read it live in Southern California -- why, we don't know what work is today. These
guys are unloading seal skins waist-deep all winter working 12 to 15 hours a day and
as an insight into what it was like to go on a sailing ship as your summer job back
then, nothing beats "Two Years before the Mast." And it's quite well written, too.
Rockwell Kent is a famous artist, as you know
an illustrator, and this is a book of his called "N by E," and
it's the story of his yachting voyage to Greenland. "In this book is told the
story of an actual voyage to Greenland in a small boat, of a shipwreck there of
what if anything happened afterwards," some of which may or may not have
happened not to knock Rockwell Kent's imagination but this is supposed to be a
first-hand account. I cite it because if you can find
an edition with his prints in it, and I think you can online, it's extraordinary.
You know, when it comes to illustration you can't beat Rockwell Kent.
"At 2:30 in the afternoon we left our anchorage. We didn't sail out, we were
towed. Tired of waiting for a wind, ashamed of
inaction, embarrassed by abortive leave-takings, we wanted only to get out of it
and off to sea." Rockwell Kent, the pictures alone are worth the price of admission. "N by E."
Well, here's a book I'll bet you haven't heard of, which
has affected me greatly. It's called "The Boy, Me and the Cat" by Henry M Plummer.
Well -- my father gave me this it says here in February 1981 -- "The Cruise of the Mascot,
1912 to 1913." The Mascot is a small, gaff rigged catboat that father and son,
Henry M. Plummer and Henry M. Plummer, Jr., sail down the intercoastal waterway to
Florida. It's written in a delightfully naive style. I think this book was lost
for a long time until it was recognized for what it is, which is a
really good account with a cute, as it were, title, "The Boy, Me and the Cat," the
cat comes to -- well, I won't tell you what happens to the cat, Scotty I think is his
name. What I will tell you is why I can hardly read this book now without
extreme emotion. Here's the dedication, written to a 13- or 14-year-old boy.
"To my companion Henry M plumber Jr., who with unfailing patience bore with my
fretful exactions and was ever ready to lend a willing hand, who joined
me in love for Scotty, and in grief at her death --that's the cat -- to this boy, who
is my joy and my pride....
Well. .
All right, let's try that again without the emotion. "...To this boy...
to this boy , who is my joy and my pride, this log is lovingly dedicated by his father."
Very nice. "The Boy, Me and the Cat." But...
some years later, when the book was rediscovered by publishers,
the New Bedford, Massachusetts [Mercury] of May 9th, 1928, reported the following:
"Mr. Plummer's son, Henry M. Plummer, Jr., who appears in this book,
was an aviator in the Great World War,
killed in action.
When you read the book you get to know these guys.
On a lighter note, let's move our perspective worldwide, and from this very bunk here
in this very harbor in Southern California. And that we will do -- and this
is a great gift for anyone who keeps talking about sailing around the world --
Jimmy Cornell's "World Cruising Routes." This book this book should not
be allowed to exist because it tells you how to sail around the world and to anywhere
you want to, with directions and even waypoints in the newest edition, and I
think that I think that if you give this to somebody, his wife's going to say
"George, why are you reading that book about world cruising routes by Jimmy Cornell?"
Here's one -- "Route PS 106 Queensland to Papua New Guinea. There are two main
routes crossing the Coral Sea from Queensland to Papua New Guinea one that
goes direct to the capital port ... no no no, we oughtn't to read that too often
wanderlust gets going and I think that now we've finished this assay of
Christmas books, I shall go home and instead of sailing around the world, take a nap.
Thanks for listening.