Sailor of Fortune

COMMODORE BARNEY, one of our comparatively neglected heroes, offers a first-class subject for a life-size biography. He was a wise and dashing sailor, and his exploits in the Revolution and the War of 1812, both in the American and in the French navy, entitle him to rank as second only to John Paul Jones. He was gay and charming, combative and arrogant, and he was in trouble all his days. Mr. Footner paints a sympathetic and vivid portrait, but he does it with an unconventionality which may shock or amuse the reader. That whirring sound you hear as you turn the pages is caused by Parson Weems, Parkman, Prescott, Motley, et al. revolving in their graves. He writes in pure Americanese, which well-bred, lit’ry biographers simply do not do. Commodore Barney ‘had a yen to visit South America’; his captors were ‘roughnecks’; he ‘gave the high sign to his men’; wounded, ‘he was all in’ — and so on. Thomas Babington Macaulay would not have approved of Mr. Footner’s prose style, but to some of us it is a refreshing escape from the stuffed-shirt school of biography.