A SHIP AS HEROINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 22, 24 November 1939, Page 37

A SHIP AS HEROINE

THE SAGA OF "CIMBA." By Richard Maury. Harrap. London. 254 pp., with drawings by the author. 8/6 net. When the. Cimba talks, Mr. Maury hears the poetry of the winds, and when she ghosts before light airs he sees in her slender lines the run and grace of the sea itself. She is the heroine of his book. He is sensitive to the human element in the adventure, but even his feelings about the deaths of friends are choked back while the Cimba must still be nursed and tended. | He found her in Nova Scotia. Her overall length is 35 feet 3 inches, her waterline length 26 feet, her beam 9 feet 6 inches, and she draws only 3 feet and a few inches-a small craft, as he says, "carrying within her insignificant body a soul as stormy as the winds of her Nova Scotia." But she is sturdy. In the fight against the sea she is seldom defeated. When she is she gives no. more quarter than she must. She is capsized by a great wave, and righted by another. She is buffeted here, bumped there. She is strained and tested until the reader, by now believing that she is alive and can feel, will wonder how she does not give in to the rack and thrust of the torment which wind and sea heap upon her. But the art that "has taken a bundle of wood and tubs of metal fasteners to create an object attaining poise and the simple beauty of utility," also created a thing with a will and a determination so strong that not even the final ordeal started a single seam or fractured a single frame, although the drag across sharp coral rubbed through seven strakes. It is not only the personality of Cimba that enlivens Maury’s tale of her cruise downhill through the Atlantic and across the Pacific to Fiji. It was a memorable cruise for so small a hull, and it brought him plenty of exciting incident for story telling, but the book is made memorable for landsmen as well as for men of the sea as much by the author's flair for a phrase as by the beauty of his leading lady.

She is attacked, he says, "by grey white water, broken, wild, to be sent skating, wedging over ocean," or "the Cimba smoked, holding a flashing bone in her teeth," and "with wet sails flattened in the wind she weaved and smashed a way into the white horses, travelling more like a submarine than a schooner." Maury confesses to the authorship of sentimental poems, but has no regrets when they are washed away by the unsentimental sea. "We cannot hold the same poetry throughout life." Those readers who are willing to confess, at the end of the saga, that Cimba has carried them closer than they like to sentiment, will grasp at this philosophy to temper the near tragedy of the last pages.