BLUE WATER MEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 14

BLUE WATER MEN

IN DEEP, by Frank Baines; Eyre & Spottiswoode, English price 21/-. OH, THE MONKEYS HAVE NO TAILS, by Reese Wolfe; Victor Gollancz, English price 15/-. OO often books about voyages under sail rely upon the intrinsic glamour of their subject for success. No such criticism can be made'of In Deep, the second volume of Frank Baines’s "imaginative autobiography." Mr Baines is an artist and a highly individual one, and this evocation of life at sea has as Many moods as the element itself. The voyage of the Matthew Scoblie is a composite of many voyages, not only those of the author but of other men; thus the name of the ship is a convenient fiction. (For those interested in precise fact, Mr Baines’s first voyage was on- the Lawhill, in the thirties.) This imaginative method has resulted in a distillation of sea experience, poetic concentration of its beauty, ugliness and improbable fantasy. Sailors, when they launch into print, often tap previously hidden reservoirs of virtue; Mr Baines, who obviously scorns such prudery, gives some wonderfully Rabelaisian descriptions of the coarser side of shipboard life. His deftest touch, however, is reserved for satire. I have read few things funnier than his description of the highnoa@ni ceremony of shooting the sunwhen the officers, gathered at the standard compass, perform their esoteric rites in front of the lowly brasspolishers "with the glazed sightless smile of royalty .. ." Besides humour, the narrative has its times of tragedy and violence; best of all its quiet moments when the author

wryly remembers the dreams born of youth and the tropic night: *‘T’ll buy a ketch. I’ve often bin thinkin’ of it, I could buy a crayfish boat. They’re that sea-worthy." "We could put in some fishing." "Off the Barrier Reef, There’s money in that.’’ "Sail to New Zeaoo erg "Personally I'd make for Darwin." "Pearl diving!" "Yeah. And hs gold in New Guinea It was a revelation of a fact of life, says Reese Wolfe, when he discovered that John Masefield after writing "Sea Fever" had never gone down to the sea again, instead had written about it "from foggy memory, on dry land, years afterwards." Wolfe, who went to sea on a Dollar line tramp in the thirties after reading Richard Halliburton’s Royal Road to Romance, found his vision of sea life did not survive the reality. That the latter was not overharsh suggests his vision had serious inadequacies: these inadequacies persist for there is really little of the sea itself in

this book. Still, we get to know Mr Wolfe, and grow to like him-also his sad little monkey companion, together with the group of finely delineated eccentrics who sail with him on the

Grace Dollar.

R.A.

K.