THE BOOK LOCKER By Alfred T. Hill
BOOKS Hester's Window, Flung Wide
Writing on the sea cuts a wide swath in our literature! This point comes out in two important books I have learned to turn to on this subject: Charles Lewis's Books of the Sea (Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1943, 318 pp.) and Myron J. Smith, Jr. and Robert C. Weller's Sea Fiction Guide (Meruchin NJ, Scarecrow Press, I 975, 256 pp.). Lewis's book has twenty chapters, on sea stories, poetry, plays, sea literature in other languages, naval history, navigation, seamanship, oceanography and other topics. Each chapter provides a critical discussion, followed by a reading list of 50 authors. Smith and Weller have compiled and annotated bibliography of 2525 titles, and just looki ng through it suggests how greatly our literature has been enriched by writers following their bent to sea. What distinguishes sea literature from a rattling good adventure story, an interesting technical work, or a mere narrative of fishing, cruising, racing or "messing about in boats?" I submit these criteri a: Such a work must have stood the test of time; its author must have achieved wide readership and fame; it must be recognized by discriminating critics, and be cited by them in awards, lists, and other ways to point out good reading; it must deal with profound human experience. When we follow such pointers we come to giants lik e Homer, the Psalmists, and Shakespeare in our m-idst. Dante, a fellow-poet writing 2,000 years after Homer's time, called him "lord of the sublimest song, soaring over the others like an eagle." A few cent uri es later Alexander Pope more soberly said: "Be Homer's works your study and delight; read them by day and meditate by night" (not a bad test for a classic!). But anyone who has lived with Homer's Odysseynot a work to read and put down, it haunts you-will rejoice with me most in
the great critic Walter Bagehot 's dictum :
"A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a greal objecl of which he has no idea. " The Bible abounds in sea yarns, from Jonah's time in the belly of a whale to Jesus walking on . the water, and St. Paul's narrative of the shipwreck. The Psalms offer some of the loveliest and most moving sea poetry ever written, in which "deep calls unto deep." In Shakespeare the sea experience is transmuted, indeed, into "something rich and strange." Our friend Charles Lewis notes that Shakespeare refers so often to the sea, and with such accuracy, "that some scholars have come to the conclusion that the greatest of English poets must have had some experience as a sailor." He goes on to cite Shakespeare's ever-memorable definition of true love: "O no! it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star of every wandering bark , Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken." We could-and if space a llowed we wou ld-go on to speak of o th er poets, Coleridge, Byron, Kipling, Masefield, Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman, and that with more than some joy. But in these four lines alone Shak es peare shows the way to all, incidentally with a seafaring image of start ling workabilit y. And I have an uneasy feeling that he not only meets but overtakes our criteria: The test of time? He defines it. Critical recognition? Critics are tested by what they think of Shakespeare-as, perhaps, are we all.
(To be conlinued) Dr. Hill, author of Voyages (New York, David McKay, 1977), lives in Cape Cod and lectures on sea literature for the Sea Education Association of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
BASIL LUBBOCK'S
CHINA CLIPPERS 310 pages, 11 plans
$15 POSTPAID SEAWAYS BOOKS
ONLY Send to:
Box 27 4, Rte. 94
Salisbury Mills, NY 12577
56
Tall Ships on Puget Sound, the Marine Photographs of William Hesler, by Robert Weinstein (Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1978, 144 pp., ill., $14.95). Under the grey cover of a Puge t Sound overcast day, and through the drizzle of the fall and winter months, a German immigrant named William Hester hauled his tripod and camera to the busy shippi ng corners of Port Blake ly, Tacoma and Seattle more than seventy years ago. Searching for the right position, good lighting and the best view of his subject matter, Mr. Hester captured ships and people on glass plates and thus preserved a remnant of harbor life which vanished before World War I. In the aggrega te, those plates finally numbered over 1300, and they were eventually boxed and stored in Hester 's Seattle home for forty years. That such bulky items as the boxes which co nt a ined these plates ¡had survived that long is a minor miracle, in light of the urban convu lsions which rocked portions of Seattle in recent years. Huge dieselpowered snapper-grabbers chewed up houses and buildings to make way for the 1-5 highway, which now bisect s Seattle, and Hester's homestead was one of those old wooden dwellings which was obliterated in the 1960s. But before all that, Hester lived alone for decades, overlooking Lake Union, until he died in 1947 at the age of about seventy-five . His little house was subsequently bought by a couple who didn't know what was in the attic. Eight years after Hester's death, in mid-July 1955, this reviewer received a letter from Captain Alan Villiers, which had been written shortly after the noted seafaring author had returned home to Oxford from a visit he had paid to Seattle and Tacoma . In part, the letter said : "A Mrs . Norah B. Sands in Seatt le writes me about so me photographs of ships taken at Puget Sound . Know her? She has a large collection of glass negs, she says, that were in the house she boug ht. I am answering her, of course ... . " Fort un ate ly J erry and Nora Sands were willing to retain the entire collection intact, and to sell it to worthy and appreciative buyers. In due course, a serious move was generated in California to acq uire the collection. The San Francisco Maritime Mu seum has been fio rt unate during the thirty-odd years of its ex istence, to have had the aggressivene$s to find means so mehow to acquire hwndreds and th1iusands of film SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1979