10,000 Leagues Over the Sea

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Brewer, Warren, and Putnam, $3,50]

THIS was his equipment: a 10-ton, 32-foot ketch with a Kermath motor and water tanks holding a forty-day supply: a sextant, compass, pilot book, and charts, canned foods, a small library, fishhooks, medicine chest, and a tiny canoe. He had a crew of one. It was his ambition to sail round the world, to touch at every remote island, every little-known port, to stay as long as be chose at an anchorage, to see and talk with the world at large. Mr. Robinson is no hairy viking; he weighs, in fact, 145 pounds soaking wet. That he did just what he set out to do, that he brought his ship through innumerable storms and hazards and home again without accident, that he suffered only one small touch of fever, and that, his three-year expedition cost him less than $5000 — these are random indications of the wiry self-reliance with which he handled the Svaap. But there is much more to this book than a seafaring record, however fine.

Robinson is an admirably curious person. He went places and did things not so much for the sake of the kudos (which seems to be the chief incentive of our lecture-bureau adventurers), but because he was honestly curious to meet the remote people of our planet. He was forever making excursions inland. When he came to the Galapagos he met the fascinating Karin, and with her spent many days exploring the pampas; for eight months he lived ashore in Papeete, and when he left, his man Friday, Etera, went, with him; he knew the natives three hundred miles upcountry in New Guinea; he almost lost his life during the Ramadhan at Makalla; and while ‘reef crawling’ through the Red Sea he was twice captured and held for ransom by Arabians of the desert. Robinson had something of Captain Cook’s capacity for getting on with people even if he could n’t speak their lingo — just as he could jolly live pirates into releasing him so he could afford to travel light and live off the country with a grin. Ashore, his open fearless curiosity led him in and out of a hundred situations, much to the reader’s entertainment. At sea we watch the crew in the person of that amazing black boy Etera and occasionally catch glimpses of the skipper himself, as when he confides that he was seasick only once and then ‘from eating poisonous candlenuts,’ or when he used too much chemical in the water and so had to drink ‘what tasted like a dilute solution of Zonite.’ I only wish he had given us more of such domestic details, just as I wish the publishers had given us a good map of his progress.

There is another singularity about this book that I rejoice in — its complete absence of ’side.’ Robinson may have had the devil of a time warping the Sraap through the Panama Canal, but, unlike Halliburton, he did not try to swim that stream on the installment plan. About his navigation — perhaps his most remarkable single feat — he speaks with utmost candor. Even his fascinating fish stories don’t overstretch credulity. The exploits in this book are memorable for their true ring. And in an Appendix which must not be missed he disposes of the myths of seafaring in a way to do him proud.

EDWARD WEEKS