A WHALER’S LOG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 430, 19 September 1947, Page 12

A WHALER’S LOG

LOGBOOK FOR GRACE. By Robert Cushman Murphy. Macmillan, New York, 1947. (Reviewed by Dr. R. A. Falla) HE hunting of the sperm whale, an industry that flourished for rather less than a century, has provided a background for at least one literary classic in Melville's Moby Dick and made a steady best-seller of Bullen’s Cruise of the Cachalot. And now R. Cushman Murphy, writing of the declining years of the sperm whaler under the modest title Logbook for Grace, has made another contribution to literature of a father different kind. Moby Dick is a skilful Blend of allegory, fact, atid fiction: The Cruise of the Cachalot is also fictiofial to the extent that it was compounded from stories gathered during a short cruise by Bullen in the New Zealand whaler Splendid, out of Dunedin. Murphy’ 8 account of his cruise in the Daisy is simply narrative, enlivened by a literary gift and rare enthwidis asm, and readers with an appreciation

of the viewpoint of a scientifically trained and cultured author will be grateful to him for allowing this graphic and intimate record of expefierces to be published. The original "logbook" was written for his wife, without any idea of publication, wherein lies much of its charm. As the author says in his preface the everits are factual, the thoughts contemporary, and if the emotional or intellectual content of the book seems boyish, that is as it should be. No reader is likely to find it either dull or "dated." Moods and scenes change too quickly for that as the whaling brig and her crew pass frotn Caribbean summer and the Sargasso Séa, into the South-east trades that cafry them, through Cape Horn weather, to South Georgia, an outpost of the Antaftctic. The story of the outward voyage is packed with vivid description of life on a whalet" arid details of the huft, and the young scientist, astonishingly well prepared and suited for his work, manages to convey the essence of his research in racy and absorbing nartative which never flags.

The same holds for his account of man and nature in South Georgia, and by the time the homéward voyage begins the reader has become absorbed in interest in the personalities ang fortunes of the Daisy’s mixed crew. It is hard to realise that such conditions as those described existed as late as 1913, but the ship, the human types, and the technique of sperm whaling and sealing were the last survivors of an era, already a century old, that had reached its end. Next to the wife who inspired this buoyant logbook the author acknowledges inspiration for his scientific record to the journal of Charles Darwin of the Beagle.