"GALES, ICE AND MEN"

Radio Record, 10 June 1938, Page 29

"GALES, ICE AND MEN"

Conducted by

ANTAR

A Vety Remarkable Biography of a Very Rematkable Ship (Special to the ‘Record’’) IRST and last J have read a good deai about ships having personalities. Not being a seafaring man, | realised abstractly that they might have personalities-and left it contentedly at that. For the first time now, I have come upon a book which really convinces me on the point. It is Frank Wead’s "Gales, Ice and Men,’ published by Methuen, of London, a biography-and a very remarkable biography-of the steam barquentine Bear. 1 imagine the story of that amazing ship has been written largely from her log, but also from some personal experience of the Arctic seas which she sailed for more than half a century. The story is bald, in a literary sens: undescriptive, but the very sparsity and simplicity of its style, the frequent repetitions, have a remarkable effect on the reader. ‘They imbue him with a gripping sense of authenticity. If you are tired-as I am-of reading millions of words written about "less and less," of footling and inane reminiscences by people whose existence is built on "publicity," and who will be happily forgotten hefore the turn of the century: if you are tired of emasculated gentlemen who live for Art, and close-cropped female wits who live on Artists; if you are tired of city streets and stories of tenement star-vation-the biography of the Bear will come as an ice-cold shower on a hangover. In some measure it has the breadth of an epic. Hl "Bear" was a U.S. coastguard cruiser in the days when America put up its bloody fight to protect the fur seals of the Pacifie from exterminaition at the hands of commercial murderers, The"Bear’ convoyed transport ships in the hectic days of the Klondyke gold rush, rescued a score or more of whalers crushed in the terrible pack ice that sweeps down from the Pole in autumn, was driven time and time again into the frozen hell of the north to succour the shipwrecked and the hungry. More than once her crew met face to face the terrible starvation of the Arctic ---brought men back to life who had heen reduced to eating the hodies of their dead comrades. She ferried reindeer from Siberia to the doomed Kskimos of Northern Alaska, IJifer life wis too full of herculean brayeries and Jabours for any review to chronicle them at second hand in hope of giving an ideg of its seope,

if your palate can still savour real adventure, and if you need no literary tricks to sugar-coat the pill of your reading, buy "Gales, Ice and Men," and enjoy every word of it. It is a redblooded history for people whose blood is not too bleached by too-comfortable civilisation, "Gales, Ice and Men" by Frank Wead (Methuen, London). Our copy from the publish:rs. =