Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

The unentertaining oxymoron of the gentleman pirate

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) was an Italian-British writer of adventure novels. His books often feature swashbuckling heroes who would go on to be played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Stewart Granger in Hollywood film adaptations. One such novel (and a film role for Flynn) is Captain Blood, published in 1922.

The auspiciously named Peter Blood is a middle-aged Irish-born ex-soldier and -adventurer who now plies the gentler trade of physician in the English town of Bridgewater. In the 1680s, when rebels supporting James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, rose up against the English King James II, Blood could care less about the politics, but one of his neighbors, a Monmouth rebel, is injured in the fighting, and Blood dutifully tends his wounds. For this service, Blood is arrested by royal forces for aiding and abetting the rebellion. Under normal circumstances, he would be hanged, but instead James sentences a number of prisoners, Blood included, to slavery on the English plantations of Barbados. Even as a slave, Blood manages to gain a reputation as a physician in Barbados, but needless to say, slavery is not to his liking. He escapes his captors, commandeers a ship, and assumes the role of a pirate.

As a pirate story, Captain Blood has its enjoyable moments. The scenes of naval battles and sword duels are well-done and exciting but few and far between. The problem with Captain Blood is that Sabatini constantly wants to emphasize that Blood is a gentleman and only a reluctant pirate. This preoccupation with gentlemanliness, so common to English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, takes almost all the fun out of the story. One might hope for a Han Solo-type scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold, but no, that’s not what you’re getting here. Instead, Captain Blood is a dull, smug, self-righteous prig.

Sabatini clearly wants to hold Blood up as the exemplar of manhood, and in doing so he makes the character practically flawless. Blood is the smartest mind in every argument, the most skillful sword in every fight, and the wiliest strategician in every naval engagement. When you think about memorable heroes, they often lose before they can win. We like to see them struggle to earn their victories, but Blood never struggles for anything because he’s perfection incarnate. The only area in which Sabatini allows the character any vulnerability is his heart. Blood develops an unwise and unrealistic infatuation for a beautiful young woman who happens to be the daughter of the slavemaster who owns him. Contrary to his martial heroics, in emotional matters Blood is an absolute milquetoast, and it’s difficult to admire his abjectly submissive way with women.

In between the few action scenes, Captain Blood consists mostly of conversations in which honor is debated at length. Each character asserts: I live by a code of honor. My actions are honorable; yours are not. These are the qualities of a gentleman; you sir, are not a gentleman. In addition, there are the familiar tropes of sworn enemies who “give their word” that they won’t attack their adversaries or try to escape captivity—as usual, that comes across as unrealistic and silly. Again, this English obsession with nobility and gentlemanliness. Credit to the French where it’s due: you won’t find these tedious debates in The Three Musketeers. Instead of wasting so many words on honor, just show us the definition of honor through your character’s behaviors. Alas, Captain Blood could have been a much more compelling book without all this sanctimonious posing. The plot of this novel would have made a good adventure novel along the lines of Alexandre Dumas’s or Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, but the telling is tiresome and reduces this story to a middling pirate tale at best.

Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl

Chasing secrets on Easter Island

Thor Heyerdahl was an explorer who achieved worldwide fame in the 1950s and ‘60s—not quite as famous as Jacques Cousteau, perhaps, but close. The Norwegian adventurer and experimental archaeologist is best-known for riding a raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to French Polynesia, a journey he recounted in his book and Oscar-winning documentary film, both entitled Kon-Tiki. His follow-up to this much-celebrated achievement was an expedition to Easter Island in 1955 and 1956, which is recounted in his book Aku-Aku, published in 1957.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is known for its giant stone heads carved out of lava rock. At the time of Heyerdahl’s trip, little was known about who made them, how they were made, and how the incredibly heavy rocks were transported to and erected at their various locations around the island. The thesis that Heyerdahl spent his life trying to prove is that Polynesian islanders are of American origin, essentially descendants of seafaring Inca or other Indigenous Peruvians. On Easter Island, he looked for evidence to support that theory and did find some correspondence between the artworks of Easter Island and those of the Inca. Heyerdahl was not an academic scientist, which opens him up to criticism by those with PhDs who regard him as merely an adventurer and pseudoscientst, so on this expedition he invited three professional archaeologists along on this expedition.

What amazed me the most about this book was learning that when Heyerdahl’s team arrived on Easter Island, all of the famed statues had been toppled face down in the dirt. This happened during a civil war on the island a couple centuries earlier. Heyerdahl, with the help of Indigenous workers, used traditional non-mechanical techniques to raise one of the statues upright. This was the first of such modern re-raisings. When you see photographs of a dozen monolithic heads lined up along the coast of Easter Island, all of those were raised after Heyerdahl, most of them not until the 1990s, when major restoration efforts were undertaken to encourage tourism. Heyerdahl was really the spark that set that flame of tourism alight, for better or for worse. On the one hand he brought attention to the cultural heritage of Rapa Nui; on the other hand his tactics trained the Natives to exploit that heritage for commerce.

While the giant stone heads, or moai, are quite fascinating, most of the book is not about that. It’s about Heyerdahl trying to convince the islanders to grant him access to their secret caves or hand over to him the artifacts that are contained therein. Heyerdahl’s methods of persuasion were not entirely ethical by today’s standards, nor is what ultimately happened to the artifacts (I think he just took them away on his boat). He starts out by bartering cloth and knives for small statues. He then moves up to chicanery in the form of exploiting the Natives’ superstitions to his advantage. Not only is this disturbing, it’s also rather boring. Long chapters go by in which Heyerdahl is just conning his way into these families’ caves, then not much is really said about the artifacts themselves and what they reveal about the island’s cultural history.

Heyerdahl’s theories on the Peruvian colonization of Polynesia have not stood up well to scientific scrutiny. Still, he’s usually very good at writing the adventure stories of his expeditions. Kon-Tiki is an excellent read, and I also enjoyed Fatu-Hiva, his account of roughing it in the Marquesas. Aku-Aku, however, is not as engrossing as those other books. It gets dull and repetitive, and Heyerdahl doesn’t talk much about the discoveries of the archaeologists who accompanied him. Other than collecting a lot of statuettes that aren’t thoroughly described to the reader, it’s unclear what exactly Heyerdahl and his team accomplished on Easter Island. Perhaps more is revealed in his more scientific publications, such as Archeology of Easter Island (2 volumes), published in 1965.

Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery by Jules Verne

Robinson Crusoe fantasy camp

Not too long ago, in reviewing The Swiss Family Robinson by John David Wyss, I briefly touched upon the profound influence that Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe has had on world literature. That novel clearly had an affect on Jules Verne, who wrote at least a handful of “robinsonades” and included Crusoe-like plot elements in many of his novels of travel and exploration. Verne’s adventure novel L’école des Robinsons was published in 1882. The French title literally translates into The School for Robinsons, and the book has been published in English as School for Crusoes and An American Robinson Crusoe. The 1883 London translation of the novel, however, was entitled Godfrey Morgan, after its protagonist.

Godfrey, an orphan, was raised by his uncle, the billionaire William W. Kolderup of San Francisco. Kolderup also has an adopted daughter, Phina, with whom Godfrey is conveniently betrothed. (Almost every Verne novel features a pair of young lovers engaged to be married.) Before he ties the knot, however, young Godfrey wants to travel the world. Having never ventured far outside of the gilded cage in which he was brought up, Godfrey now has a spell of wanderlust. His future father-in-law grants Godfrey his consent to embark on a round-the-world voyage, provided he is chaperoned by his tutor, Prof. Artelett, a dandy who teaches dancing and deportment. The two head west across the Pacific Ocean towards New Zealand but never make it there. Their ship is wrecked in a storm, and the crew is lost. The two gentlemen from San Francisco find themselves marooned alone on a deserted island.

Much like the original Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, these two castaways enjoy a number of fortunate boons. All of the livestock from their ship miraculously makes it to shore, a box washes up on the beach containing many implements necessary for survival, and a hollow sequoia presents itself as a makeshift townhouse. This is not the most arduous of survival stories. Godfrey and Artelett spend most of their time gathering roots and occasionally shooting a deer. These fellows are far less industrious than the Swiss Family. In order to add some excitement to the proceedings, Verne brings in perils that belong on an entirely different continent. Eventually all is explained, though the explanation is ridiculous.

Though Verne is famous for his science fiction, little science is employed in the survival of these two gentlemen. Typical of Verne, however, this novel is largely a secular, rationalist take on the Crusoe genre. Although obligatory mention is made of the almighty every now and then, this wilderness sojourn is not a meditation on divinity like the pious contemplations of Crusoe and the Swiss. Unfortunately, there are a couple racist comments about dark-skinned islanders here. In general, I’ve found Verne to be more enlightened than many of his contemporaries, but he was still guilty of the ignorance and prejudices of his era.

There isn’t much mystery to this “Californian Mystery.” Verne sets up the plot so that every event is telegraphed well ahead of time. You’d have to be ten years old or less not to see where this story is going. Everything is so obvious that it must have been intentional by Verne to let the audience in on secrets to which Godfrey and Artelett are not privy. Does that strategy pay off? Well, so-so. This isn’t one of Verne’s more intelligent or exciting novels, but it is moderately fun, and the characters are likable. If you’ve read any of Verne beyond his two or three more famous books, then you probably know what to expect, and Godfrey Morgan neither disappoints nor exceeds those expectations.

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

The luckiest castaways ever

Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, was one of the first novels in the English language, and it had a huge influence on subsequent literature. It even established its own international genre of like-minded survival stories, known as “robinsonades,” a category that includes everything from The Lord of the Flies to Gilligan’s Island, among many others. One of the earlier and best-known robinsonades is The Swiss Family Robinson by Swiss author John David Wyss, published in four volumes from 1812 to 1827.

In 1798, the French Revolution spills over into Switzerland, bringing a wave of secularization with it. As a result, a Swiss clergyman is stripped of his fortune. He decides to emigrate with his family to start a new life in Australia. During a heavy storm, the vessel carrying them wrecks on some rocks somewhere in the East Indies. The crew flees the wreck in the lifeboats, abandoning the Swiss family to their own devices. The wrecked ship fails to sink, and when the weather clears, the family—father, mother, and four sons—make their way to a nearby island that appears previously undiscovered and uninhabited. Alone on this deserted isle, with no rescue expected, they must learn to survive and settle in for the long haul. The surname of the family in question is never specified, but, since they’re Swiss, it’s unlike they were the Robinsons. The inclusion of “Robinson” in the title is merely a tribute to Robinson Crusoe.

If there is a moral to The Swiss Family Robinson it is that “the good Lord will provide,” and boy, does He ever! Much like the original Crusoe, the family has access to their wrecked vessel, which serves as a veritable hardware store, grocery, and Noah’s ark. The bounty of this undiscovered isle also defies belief, as the family is practically showered with beneficial plants and animals. These gifts they industriously employ in the development of all manner of civilized technologies to ensure their health, comfort, and joy. After reading chapter after chapter of the family’s always-successful efforts in engineering, agriculture, and science, the reader would not be surprised if they built a bamboo pedal car like Gilligan used to drive around his island. They do manage to build a home inside a tree that resembles the Berenstain Bears’ abode. The tone of The Swiss Family Robinson is relentlessly pious and cheerful. While some of the original Crusoe’s McGyver-like accomplishments defied belief, at least they were balanced by hardships. On the Swiss family’s “Happy Island,” there are no hardships. Content with the hand they’ve been dealt, the family makes no attempt to facilitate a rescue, such as building a signal fire. The parents don’t seem to mind that their sons will all die virgins in remote isolation.

Robinson Crusoe had its share of religious sermonizing in the form of the hero’s quasi-Transcendentalist philosophical musings on God and Nature. The Swiss Family Robinson is equally pious if not more so, but the preaching comes in the form of familiar, simplified church-going platitudes. The book was likely aimed at a young audience, but the father and mother also seem designed to instruct adults in proper parenthood. Wyss repetitively imparts certain moral lessons—Be industrious, Give thanks to God, and Love your mother—couched in an entertaining and inviting story. Although Robinson Crusoe is the better work of literature, The Swiss Family Robinson may be the better adventure story for the masses, even though any dangerous sharp edges have been sanded down by the relentless optimism. This isn’t always the most intelligent book, but it is amusing. One can understand why film studios have adapted this novel into several movies and television series over the years.

Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler

Stayin’ alive in World War II Europe

English spy novelist Eric Ambler is one of the most respected authors in the history of the genre. His novel Journey into Fear was published in 1940. The story takes place at that present time, when World War II is underway in Europe. An Englishman named Graham works as an engineer for a British arms manufacturer and travels frequently for business. He has recently completed some work in Turkey and is scheduled to depart for England the following day. On his last night in Istanbul, Graham spends the evening in a nightclub with Kopeikin, a Turkish coworker. There he strikes up a friendship with an attractive dancer and also notices a suspicious man who seems to be watching him all evening. At the end of the night, when Graham returns to his hotel room, he is startled at finding someone in his room, hidden in the dark. The mysterious stranger fires three shots at Graham, one of which grazes his hand. The would-be killer then flees out the window into the darkness.

Colonel Haki, the head of the Turkish secret police, shows up to investigate. (Haki also appeared in Ambler’s previous novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios.) Haki informs Graham that he is a target for assassination by German spies. Because of his occupation, Graham holds vital information in his head pertaining to the improvement of Turkey’s naval defenses. Killing Graham would delay those improvements for several weeks, allowing enough time for the Nazis launch an invasion of Turkey. It is imperative that Graham return safely to London, not only to save his own life but also to protect Turkey and prevent a Nazi victory over the Allies. Haki and Kopeikin change Graham’s travel plans and sneak him onto a small ship leaving Turkey for Genoa, Italy. There are about a dozen passengers on the boat, all of whom the reader becomes well-acquainted with. Although no one was supposed to know that Graham was traveling on this particular ship, he soon finds that the secret has apparently gotten out, and he is in danger of being murdered by one of his fellow passengers.

Ambler writes very realistic spy thrillers, without any pulp-fiction heroics. What makes this story compelling is that Graham acts in a realistic way to the threats he faces, and nothing happens that’s beyond the realm of reason. Nowadays, nearly every spy thriller involves potential world domination or nuclear armageddon, and every crime film is about a serial killer or a mass murder. When this novel was written, however, around the time Alfred Hitchcock made Foreign Correspondent, the killing of one person was still considered shocking and terrifying. When reading Journey into Fear, the reader lives vicariously through Graham, imagining what you would do if your own life were similarly placed in jeopardy. Graham is by no means an action hero, but he has enough courage to keep his wits about him and employ his brains for self-preservation.

Though this intimacy of scale is refreshing, for those of us raised on those James Bondish armageddon spy thrillers, it can also feel slow-paced and at times less than thrilling. Journey into Fear was adapted into a 1943 film, and the story is just right for a movie of roughly an hour and a half in length. When you spend a few days reading the book, however, it feels less than satisfying when the 270-page read is wrapped up with a climactic scene that lasts about all of two pages. That adds up to a lot of conversations with Graham’s fellow passengers that one has to sit through just for a small payoff of exciting action. Nevertheless, Ambler’s realistic style makes his espionage thrillers worthwhile. Because the reader can identify with Graham, and the perils he faces are credible, his fear and anxiety are palpably felt.

Jack Kirby’s The Demon by Jack Kirby

Supernatural adventures with spectacular art

Comic book artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby is best known for co-creating many of Marvel Comics’ most famous superheroes. He was Marvel’s number-one artist (both qualitatively and quantitatively) throughout the 1960s. In 1970, however, Kirby got fed up with his treatment by Marvel and jumped over to rival DC Comics. With the new creative freedom that DC allowed him, Kirby created some bold and innovative new comics series. These titles didn’t achieve household-name status like Superman and Batman, but they are nonetheless regarded in hindsight by comics aficionados as groundbreaking and amazing work. One of Kirby’s creations from this period, The Demon, made his debut in September 1972 in his own eponymous series that ran for 16 issues, up to January of 1974. The entire run of that series has been collected in a beautiful paperback edition entitled Jack Kirby’s The Demon, first published in 2008. I’m reviewing the 2017 edition (ISBN 978-1-4012-7718-5).

The story begins in the days of King Arthur. The evil sorceress Morgaine Le Fey, after laying waste to Camelot, hunts down the wizard Merlin. As he flees into another plane of existence, Merlin summons up a powerful demon named Etrigan to battle Morgaine Le Fey’s army of evil minions. Flash forward to the 1970s, and Etrigan is still doing Merlin’s bidding by fighting the forces of supernatural evil. Jason Blood, an expert in demonology, is the human host for the Demon. He undergoes a Hulk-like transformation when Etrigan’s powers are needed. This coexistence with the Demon has granted Jason immortality. He has lived for centuries without aging.

The stories here are somewhat basic: a monster shows up, and the Demon fights him. Like Shakespeare, Kirby draws story material from folklore and public domain literature. There’s a werewolf story, a Phantom of the Opera story, and a Frankenstein story, all with original touches from Kirby. The real attraction here, however, is the fabulous art, which is some of the best Kirby work I’ve ever seen. Kirby seems to have designed this series to allow himself to draw all the things he loves to draw: monsters (reptilian, rocky, furry, metallic), medieval-looking weapons and warfare, bizarre artifacts and machinery, and ugly faces. I don’t know if Kirby ever drew Doctor Strange for Marvel, but if he did, it would have looked a lot like this. This book unfortunately demonstrates that Kirby was not so great at drawing women’s faces. They look like unbaked biscuits with receding hairlines. He was a master, however, at drawing men’s faces, the uglier and craggier the better.

The Demon was not a part of Kirby’s Fourth World saga—a sci-fi/mythological epic that ran through at least four Kirby-created titles. When the Fourth World comics didn’t sell so well, DC asked Kirby to create some new stand-alone superheroes. The Demon was among these early-1970s creations, along with OMAC and Kamandi. Jason Blood, Etrigan’s human alter-ego, resides in an apartment in Gotham City, which sets him up for crossovers with Batman and other DC heroes. Although Kirby only wrote and drew the original 16-issue run of The Demon, the character has since been revived by later DC creators. The Demon has had a handful of his own series over the past half-century and has also guest-starred in the adventures of other DC heroes. Although not an A-list hero, Etrigan the Demon continues to be active in the DC universe today.

Paperback reprints of classic comics are usually printed either in black-and-white on newsprint or in full-color and bright matte paper that makes the colors too bright and garish. This volume, however, is printed on something in between, a clean white sheet with an uncoated texture that makes the colors rich and vivid. It’s very well done. Diehard Kirby fans should own this book.

Above: Cover of The Demon #2, 1972. Below: Spread from The Demon #6, 1973. Art by Jack Kirby. © DC Comics.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

The Black Hunter by James Oliver Curwood

Chivalric romance in the French and Indian Wars

James Oliver Curwood (1878–1927) was a Michigan-born writer who built a successful career writing popular wilderness adventure novels along the lines of Jack London. Many of Curwood’s books are set in Alaska or the Yukon, and some feature canine protagonists, much like London’s The Call of the Wild, White Fang, or Jerry of the Islands, among others. Curwood’s 1926 novel The Black Hunter, however, is a dog of a different color. This is a historical novel set in Quebec during the French and Indian Wars of the 18th century.

The story takes place in 1754 and 1755. David Rock is a young man who lives in the Valley of the Richelieu, a rural area in Southwestern Quebec. Though of English extraction, David lives in New France and is loyal to the French crown. He comes from a poor family and spends much of his time hunting in the nearby forests. His girlfriend, however, is loaded. Anne St. Denis, the daughter of a seigneur, lives in the local chateau. She and David have known each other since childhood and intend to marry. When some bigwigs from Quebec City come to visit Anne’s father, they insult the rustic David, and he responds by throwing two of them into a fountain. Since one of his victims is a high government official—François Bigot, the Intendant of New France—David is sentenced to a flogging. Bigot, however, at the advice of his cronies, pardons David of the sentence. What Bigot really wants is to hook up with the lovely Anne, and he figures he has a better chance of working his way into her heart (or rather her dress) if he is nice to her boyfriend rather than torturing him. The wily Bigot then takes the suspicious David under his wing, offering him a promising career in Quebec, much to the joy of Anne.

When I saw that this novel is set in “Old Quebec,” I expected a lot of backwoods Canada adventure typical of Curwood. Instead, Curwood’s depiction of Canada (New France) feels more like medieval Europe. This is mostly a courtly drama of romance and honor, somewhat along the lines of a Sir Walter Scott novel such as Ivanhoe, except that the good-versus-evil, damsel-in-distress triangle in this storyline is about as formulaic as the cartoon adventures of Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick, and Snidely Whiplash. The book defies believability in the lengths that the villains go to pretend they are David’s friends and benefactors. In reality, if a powerful man of the 18th century wanted a helpless woman, he would probably use more barbaric methods rather than go to such sly lengths, but this is fiction not history, and that wouldn’t make much of a novel.

Most of the characters in the book, including Bigot, are real figures from Canadian history. Even the Black Hunter is a figure of local legend. He is a White man with black hair and black clothes, a nomadic backwoodsman with mythical skills as a hunter and warrior, like a cross between the Outlaw Josey Wales and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo. While David is the star of the book, the Black Hunter is a supporting character who barely appears in the book.

Only in the last quarter of the book does Curwood really dive into the French and Indian Wars, but that is the best part of the book. He has clearly done his research, and the brutality and gore of the final chapters belies the genteel chivalric tone of what came before. The treatment of Native Americans in the book is complicated. They are depicted largely as savage killing machines, but it is acknowledged that they have been made so by the English and French, with bounties and booze, who use the Indians for their own selfish ends. If Curwood had concentrated more on the wars and the Whites relations with the First Nations, it would have been a better book. Instead, you have to wade through an awful lot of wholesome romance and courtly intrigue to get to the good stuff. Nevertheless, the novel is fine overall and one of Curwood’s better efforts.

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

Crime caper in the Spanish-American War

Elmore Leonard got his start writing Westerns back in the 1950s and eventually became one of America’s bestselling authors in the genre of crime fiction. His 1998 book Cuba Libre, a historical novel set during the Spanish-American War, is somewhat of an intersection between these two genres. Though technically not a Western, it does often read like a horse opera that just happens to be set in the Caribbean.

The story opens in 1898, right after the USS Maine has been sunk in Havana Harbor but shortly before the United States has declared war on Spain. Ben Tyler, a cowboy by trade, gets out of Yuma Territorial Prison, where he has been incarcerated for bank robbery. He meets up with his old friend and former ranch boss Charlie Burke, who recruits Tyler into a scheme to ship horses from Galveston to Cuba. The horses are just a cover, however, for a smuggled shipment of guns to be sold to the Cuban revolutionaries fighting for independence from Spain. When Tyler and Burke arrive in Cuba, however, they are double-crossed by their contacts in Cuba and harassed by Cuban law enforcement. This puts Tyler and Burke in a difficult position from which they must escape if they hope to obtain their hard-earned profit and take revenge on their antagonists.

I’m a fan of Leonard’s writing in general, but this is not his best work. Transplanting his usual crime caper fare to this historical setting should have worked out fine, but here in some cases the history gets in the way of the crime fiction and vice versa. Just when the heist plot seems to be gaining momentum, the reader gets diverted into a historical aside. I don’t think it’s necessary that the reader know the barrel width of every gun on every battleship, nor the failures of every general participating in the war. I prefer Leonard’s earlier Westerns, which would sometimes incorporate historical information—such as the Civil War in Last Stand at Sabrer River—but in a less obtrusive way. The plot of Cuba Libre is a bit low on thrills. There’s a comic undertone that nullifies much of the danger that would realistically occur in this scenario. The most exciting scene in the book happens towards the front, and the conclusion of the novel is less than climactic.

The characters are also not particularly interesting. They are rather thinly drawn and somewhat generic. If this book were made into a movie like most of Leonard’s novels, some quirky or charismatic actors could bring some interesting life to these characters, but on the page they come across as pretty bland. It’s also disappointing that only a few of the supporting characters are Cubans or Spaniards. All of the leads—the hero, the best friend, the leading lady, the villain—are white Americans. You learn more about the sugar industry and the American military’s part in the Spanish-American War than you do about Cuban culture or the revolution.

What Leonard is consistently good at is writing clever and lively dialogue and creating crime schemes that pit multiple parties against one another in configurations that keep the reader guessing as to the outcome. Both of those qualities are evident in Cuba Libre, but to a lesser extent than I recall from other books of his that I’ve read. The plot here feels safer and more predictable than the gritty realism of many of his Westerns or even the less serious contemporary adventures of his Raylan Givens novels. It’s still Elmore Leonard, though, and although Cuba Libre is unlikely to show up on any top ten list of his works, it’s still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction that’s out there.

I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

Kansas couple explores the world

Martin Johnson was a young man from Independence, Kansas, when Jack London hired him as a crew member on his yacht, the Snark, as detailed in Martin’s book Through the South Seas with Jack London (1913). London became ill and had to return to the U.S., but Johnson continued his journey and actually made it all the way around the world. After returning to Kansas, he married Osa Leighty from the equally small town of Chanute. Rather than settle down with his new bride, Martin was determined to continue his life of adventure. He invited Osa to share in his exotic exploits, and she was game for the challenge. The couple traveled the world and achieved fame for their wildlife photography, documentary filmmaking, and travel books. After Martin’s death, Osa published her autobiography I Married Adventure. It was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1940.

I Married Adventure recounts the couple’s youth and courtship in Kansas and details their subsequent adventures in the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and four trips to Africa, where they lived for a few years. Martin, the photography expert, bought the camera equipment and developed all the film. Osa was not just a passive passenger, however. She served as Martin’s right-hand woman. In addition to appearing on camera, Osa shot photos and film, shot dinner when necessary, drove a truck, managed staff, and entertained visiting dignitaries to camp like George Eastman of the Kodak company and the Duke and Duchess of York.

I admire Martin and Osa for their adventurous spirits, and I envy their travels. As a Kansan for most of my life, I also enjoyed the small-town-couple-make-it-big aspect of the story. The era in which the Johnsons traveled, however, wasn’t known for its ecological or ethnographical consciousness. The Johnsons hire 250 native porters to carry their supplies through hundreds of miles of wilderness, knowing full well that some of those porters are probably going to die along the way. If the porters aren’t moving fast enough, Martin whips them. When they reach their destination, they level swaths of forest to build a small, semi-permanent town, complete with decorative curtains and other frivolous amenities that some poor laborer had to schlep to the site. Osa brags about scattering invasive American flower seeds all over Africa. The couple have no qualms about shooting with guns the animals that they are shooting with cameras. Many anecdotes explain how the Johnsons would get as close as they could to the animals they were filming—lions, rhinos, water buffalo—until the animal would charge one spouse, and then the other would shoot the animal dead. Although the Johnsons occasionally traveled with zoologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Martin and Osa were photographers not scientists, not even amateur scientists. As a result, from this account by Osa you don’t really learn a whole lot about the animals or indigenous people that they encountered.

Although Osa clearly loved Martin, you don’t get much of a sense of his personality from this book, in which he comes across as something of a cipher. You almost get the impression that Osa really didn’t know him very well. That’s not a comment on their marriage, but rather a comment on her writing. This, however, was my grandparents’ generation, when people were more private and dignified when discussing their relationships. If spouses ever disagreed on anything, you wouldn’t hear it from Osa or my grandmother.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the Johnsons are still fondly remembered in their home state of Kansas. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute is devoted to their lives, travels, and works. Reading this entertaining biography definitely makes we want to check it out.

The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

25,000 feet under the sea

The Maracot Deep is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final novel. It was first published in book form in 1929; he died the following year. The novel was previously published in serial form in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (1927) and The Strand Magazine (1927-1928). The Maracot Deep is a science fiction novel of undersea exploration. The work will spark obvious comparisons to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it really has more in common with Conan Doyle’s own 1912 novel The Lost World.

Esteemed British oceanographer and marine biologist Dr. Maracot organizes an expedition to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He takes along two companions: zoologist Cyrus Headley, who serves as the narrator for most of the book, and Bill Scanlan, an American mechanic who serves much the same purpose as Verne’s Ned Land of Twenty Thousand Leagues. The team are lowered to the ocean floor in a vehicle similar to a bathysphere, except that this submersible is box-shaped, like an elevator. They descend five miles down into the deepest trench in the Atlantic, named the Maracot Deep in honor of the professor. The lifeline to their surface vessel is cut, leaving them stranded at the bottom of the trench with impending death a foregone conclusion. They are miraculously saved, however, by a race of undersea dwellers who prove to be the descendants of the centuries-old sunken civilization of Atlantis. 

While Verne was more interested in actual oceanographic science, here Conan Doyle is more interested in fantasy. In order for his crew to have even the slightest chance of surviving, Conan Doyle conveniently dispenses with the intense pressure exerted by great depths of water. He just invents a theory to eliminate that obstacle. One commendable choice, however, is that these Atlanteans are not able to breathe in water like fish. Instead, they have created technology to master their environment, including a breathing apparatus that would put modern scuba gear to shame. At the bottom of the ocean, Maracot and company encounter all manner of sea serpents and lethal beasts that are more mythical than scientifically authentic. Regrettably, the reader only learns the bare basics about Atlantis and its inhabitants because as soon as the three heroes make it to the ancient sunken city, they’ve already started looking for an escape from their hosts.

Even as late as 1927, Conan Doyle is unwilling to allow for a disembodied third-person narration or an interior first-person perspective. Instead, he sticks with the Victorian convention that all stories must be told in the concrete form of a written document, such as a diary, a letter, or a message in a bottle. This makes for some clunky logistics in the telling of this story, such as unnecessary multiple perspectives and a jumbled chronology. The novel proper basically ends with chapter five, but Conan Doyle must have had a seven-issue contract with the Strand, because he tacks on two chapters at the end that really should have been integrated into the main narrative rather than presented as afterthoughts. Conan Doyle’s most egregious sin with this novel, however, is that he can’t find enough sci-fi potential in undersea exploration, so he resorts to throwing in some of his usual supernatural spiritualist mumbo jumbo.

I don’t believe Conan Doyle wrote The Maracot Deep to compete with or capitalize on Verne’s masterpiece. Rather, I think he simply wanted to try his hand at one of the few subgenres of adventure literature—undersea exploration—that he hadn’t yet covered. The Maracot Deep really doesn’t hold a candle to Twenty Thousand Leagues, and it reveals Conan Doyle to be past his prime at this point. There just isn’t enough science in this watered-down science fiction.

Last Stand at Saber River by Elmore Leonard

Another riveting Western in the classic Leonard style

Nobody writes a Western like Elmore Leonard! Though better known nowadays for his crime novels and their movie and TV adaptations (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Justified), Leonard started his career as a writer of Westerns and in my opinion is one of the best that ever worked in the genre. Western novels often venture into corny territory, but not so with Leonard’s books. Last Stand at Saber River was originally published in 1956, but it reads like a Western movie of the 1970s that might have starred Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin. It was not adapted into film, however, until 1997, when it was released as a made-for-TV production starring Tom Selleck.

After years of fighting for the Confederacy on Civil War battlegrounds out East, Rancher Paul Cable returns to his home in Arizona with his wife and three small children. Upon reaching their small community in the Saber River Valley, Cable’s first stop is the local general store. There he finds his old friend the storekeeper has since passed away, to be replaced by a surly one-armed character named Janroe. This mysterious new neighbor informs the Cables that their homestead is presently occupied by the Kidston brothers, former acquaintances from before the war. Undaunted, Cable ventures out to the old homestead to inform the Kidstons that its rightful owners have returned home. The Kidstons, however, refuse to leave, asserting that Cable lost any rights to the land when he went off to fight for the Confederacy. (By this time, Arizona was controlled by the Union.) Though Saber River may be a long way from the Civil War battlefronts, heated animosity still exists between Union and Confederate sympathizers. With no law to aid him in reclaiming and defending his home, Cable takes matters into his own hands, but not without violent resistance.

What is great about Leonard’s Westerns is his no-nonsense realism. While he doesn’t turn his back entirely on the mythic aspects of Wild West lore, the characters in Leonard’s stories act like real people. There are no cut-and-dried saints and sinners here. Everyone has shades of gray in their moral code and believable motivations behind their behavior. The action scenes are riveting because they are logically constructed within the bounds of possibility. Leonard moves his gunslingers around like pieces on a chessboard, allowing the reader to imagine himself caught in the perilous situation described. The victor of these conflicts is not a superhero capable of remarkable feats with a gun but rather the one who manages to logically outsmart his opponent. Because these are not black-and-white, good-versus-evil shootouts, the danger feels real. Leonard avoids typical Western clichés to deliver a plot that is unpredictable and immensely compelling.

When Leonard originally started publishing short stories in Western pulp magazines, his early entries were more in the traditional realm of folkloric cowboy tales, as seen in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard. His storytelling evolved over time, as did literature and film as a whole, to become darker, grittier, and more daring. Last Stand at Saber River is an example of Leonard’s mature, idiosyncratic style, yet it still falls a little short of the hard-boiled intensity of 1970’s Valdez Is Coming. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a great Western read, it’s a safe bet that any of Leonard’s Western novels from 1953 to 1972 will fill the bill.

Essential X-Men, Volume 11 by Chris Claremont, et al.

At the height of mutant popularity

In the early 1990s, the X-Men were the most popular characters in Marvel’s comic line (although Spider-Man probably could have argued that point). So popular, in fact, that Marvel decided to supplement their long-running Uncanny X-Men title with an all-new comic named just plain X-Men (now known as Volume 2). This was in addition to X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, and the solo Wolverine magazine. Marvel’s trade paperback Essential X-Men Volume 11 celebrates this heyday of mutantkind by reprinting Uncanny-X-Men #273 to 280 and X-Men issues 1 to 3, along with a few crossover issues of X-Factor, The New Mutants, and The New Warriors. All of these issues were published in 1991. I was actively reading Marvel comics at this time and own at least half of these issues, but thanks to this Essential volume I was able to bridge some gaps in continuity.

Chris Claremont, the premier X-Men author since 1976, was still cranking out good work in 1991. The end of Volume 11 marks the end of his long run. Claremont writes about half of the issues in the volume, and Fabian Nicieza most of the other half. The main villains antagonizing the heroic mutants in these issues are the Shadow King and Magneto. The Magneto stories are better because they remain mostly in science fiction territory with a little bit of politics thrown in, while the Shadow King plots are mostly mystical and psionic mumbo jumbo, with the action often occurring within some character’s mind. The whole purpose of these plots seems to be to get as many mutant characters as possible into the pages, and Claremont manages to do that while still keeping the stories interesting and reasonably intelligent. Almost all of the dozen core X-Men are quite appealing characters, but the army of also-rans that populate X-Factor, the New Mutants, or X-Force seem excessively ephemeral. Just about every villain the X-Men faced in 1991 employed some form of mind control, which serves the purpose of getting the X-Men to fight each other, thus giving fans the chance to see Wolverine fight Gambit, or Professor X fight Colossus, or Rogue fight . . . Strong Guy.

Marvel’s series of Essential paperbacks reproduces classic comics in black and white on newsprint paper. Often the pages are scanned from the original inked artwork. In this volume, however, colored art has been scanned as grayscale halftones. At times this renders the panels difficult to read, as when all the characters are wearing nearly the same shade of gray. A trend began in the ‘90s of placing less importance on inking and more on digital coloration. As a result, inking of that decade often consists of fine-lined chicken-scratch cross hatching with very little shadow. The colorist would then go wild in Photoshop. In my opinion, this trend was a step down from the classic Marvel style. Of such chicken-scratch artists, however, Jim Lee was clearly the king. He draws about half of the issues in this volume, and his work looks beautiful. Although the ‘90s were not a great decade for Marvel art overall, they usually put their best artists on their popular X titles. Guys like Whilce Portacio and Andy Kubert, both of whom pencil issues in this volume, aren’t quite up to Lee’s level, but they’re still good artists for this era.

I believe Claremont and Lee’s X-Men #1 is still the highest-selling comic book of all time. Like most of the other issues in this volume, it’s a fun, thrilling, well-executed comic. There’s nothing here that will be considered a classic masterpiece like Claremont’s earlier Dark Phoenix Saga, but these stories succeed as action movies if not as Shakespearean drama. Things at Marvel would soon go downhill from here, but this volume provides a nice trip down memory lane.

The Bondman by Hall Caine

Brother vs. brother in the icy North Atlantic

There is a good chance you’ve never heard of Hall Caine, but at one time he was one of the most popular authors on Planet Earth. His book The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over one million copies worldwide. Caine’s novel The Bondman, published in 1890, may not have achieved such record sales, but it was still a blockbuster bestseller for its day and firmly established the author’s international success. The story of The Bondman takes place in Iceland and on the Isle of Man, which is located between Great Britain and Ireland. Although born in England, Caine was of Manx (Isle of Man) heritage and later settled there to become that island’s biggest celebrity and favorite son. He also wrote The Manxman, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a silent film. Prior to writing The Bondman, Caine made a research voyage to Iceland to see that country firsthand. 

Rachel Jorgenson, the daughter of the governor of Iceland, is betrothed to marry a Danish count of her father’s choosing, but instead she elopes with a burly Icelandic fisherman named Stephen Orry. Unfortunately, Orry turns out to be an abusive drunkard, and he abandons Rachel and their newborn son Jason, who are left to live in poverty. When Jason grows up, he vows that he will track down his father and kill him, or, if the old man is already dead, he will wreak his vengeance on any of Orry’s offspring. Meanwhile, Orry has run off to the Isle of Man, where he fathers another son, Michael, with a woman of ill repute. Orry mellows in his old age and has a change of heart. He regrets what he did to Rachel and realizes what a terrible father he has been, so he leaves Michael with the governor of the Isle of Man, who raises the boy lovingly in relative wealth. When Michael grows into a man and learns of his father’s history, he vows to find Rachel and his long-lost brother and help them in any way he can. Thus, we have two brothers from two different islands, who have never met, hunting each other down for opposing reasons, each unbeknownst of the other’s motives.

A lot happens in The Bondman. In every chapter, someone is being born, married, killed, imprisoned, elected governor, or relocated to some foreign land. One could say that there’s never a dull moment in The Bondman, but he or she would be lying. Despite the multinational scope and all the momentous events, each chapter is bogged down in a lot of tedious verbiage. The characters engage in much discussion of what’s happened or what’s going to happen. In most cases, the outcomes of these conversations are a foregone conclusion, but one still has to sit through them anyway. Realism is not a major concern in this romance, as the character’s lives are entwined in an intricate web of coincidental encounters and mistaken identities. It somewhat calls to mind the byzantine plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, but Caine’s web is not as skillfully spun as Alexandre Dumas’s. I admired the clever construction of the plot, with all its cyclical occurrences and karmic retribution, but I can’t say that I greatly enjoyed the reading of it.

The Bondman is an adventure romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (Rob Roy) or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Master of Ballantrae). The positive aspects of Caine’s writing don’t quite measure up to those two Scottish greats, yet he does share some of their faults. Like Scott and Stevenson, the writing is often clumsily antiquated, the plot elements so heroic they’re predictable, and the very Britishness, Scottishness, or Manxness of the cultural and historical references can be a chore for the ignorant American reader to wade through. (Just to prove I’m not anti-British, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels often have the same problems.) After reading The Bondman, I might say there’s a good reason Caine has been forgotten while the other aforementioned authors are still widely read. If you are really into classic books by Scott, Stevenson, or Cooper, however, The Bondman might be right up your alley.

Doctor Strange Epic Collection, Volume 3: A Separate Reality by Roy Thomas, et al.

First half meh, second half marvelous

The Epic Collection is a series of trade paperbacks in which Marvel reprints their classic comics in full color. The Doctor Strange Epic Collection, Volume 3, published in 2016, consists of issues from 1969 to 1974 featuring Marvel’s master of the mystic arts. I had recently read Doctor Strange Epic Collection, Volume 1 and couldn’t get my hands on Volume 2, so I jumped ahead to Volume 3. Since Volume 1, the magazine in which Doctor Strange got his start, Strange Tales, has been retitled to Doctor Strange while continuing the same numbering system. Volume 3 begins with issues 180 to 183 of that series. Apparently, the good doctor was not one of Marvel’s more popular characters at this time, because Stephen Strange retires from sorcery and superherodom in 1970. Not until December of 1971 does he return to once again take up the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme. Even then, the character was relegated to titles like Marvel Feature and Marvel Premiere. In June of 1974, however, Marvel finally had enough confidence in the character to start a new Doctor Strange series beginning at issue #1.

Volume 3 starts out well with four issues of art by the incomparable Gene Colan, whose dynamic page layouts lend themselves well to Strange’s occult adventures. The writing by Roy Thomas, however, is not so great. It was at this time that Doctor Strange was wearing a blue mask and attempting to maintain a secret identity, even though his real name and superhero name are the same. Unlike most Marvel characters, Strange has almost no personal life to speak of, which makes him rather one-dimensional, although he does have a girlfriend, Clea, who spends a lot of time on the sidelines. (There is one odd scene in which Strange meets the writer Tom Wolfe in Times Square, and it turns out they’re old friends.) The stories in the first half of the book are mostly horror stories in which Strange faces off against a series of reptilian humanoid creatures that look like they came right out of old Tales to Astonish comics. Once Colan leaves, things get even worse as the Doctor is juggled like a hot potato through the hands of a string of mediocre artists and writers.

With Marvel Premiere #9, however, writer Steve Englehart and artist Frank Brunner take up the creative duties for Strange, and from there his exploits take a turn for the better. I’m not a huge fan of Englehart; some of the stuff he wrote for the Avengers and Defenders just seemed too weird-for-weird’s sake to me. Here, however, his style meshes well with the essence of the character. After too many pedestrian horror stories, the Strange tales once again enter the realm of glorious cosmic mysticism. Brunner also excels in his artistic duties. He is not quite the consummate anatomist that Colan is, but he does a great job of envisioning and rendering all of the alternate dimensions and magical phenomena that Strange encounters in his sorcerous work.

One thing I have never seen in a superhero comic in my entire life: a character actually excuses himself to go to the bathroom. One of the villains says, “Nature calls,” and exits the room for five minutes, allowing his captive to escape. Leave it to Englehart to come up with that.

The first half of Volume 3 is probably 2-star work, with the exception of Colan’s beautiful art. The second half of the book, however, is solid 4-star work from Englehart and Brunner. Initially, the reader of this collection might judge Doctor Strange to be a forgettable B-list hero, but by the end of the volume one finds hope that the character will ascend to Marvel greatness.

Captain Antifer by Jules Verne

Orienteering to the extreme

Jules Verne’s adventure novel Captain Antifer was originally published in 1894 in the pages of the French periodical Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, under the title of Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer. The novel was published in English the following year. This is the 40th novel in Verne’s series of books known as his Voyages Extraordinaires.

In 1831, a wealthy Egyptian named Kamylk-Pasha, persecuted by a greedy relative aiming to steal his fortune, fleas his homeland with his riches. He buries his treasure, consisting of three barrels full of diamonds and other gems, on an uncharted island. Flash forward thirty years later: Pierre Servan Malo Antifer, a retired sea captain, resides in the city of Saint-Malo on the northern coast of Brittany. His prized possession is a document bequeathed to him by his father. Many years prior, during the Napoleonic wars, Antifer’s father saved the life of Kamylk-Pasha. In gratitude, Kamylk-Pasha decides to leave his fortune to his rescuer. He gives the senior Antifer a document in which he has written the latitude of the island where his treasure lies buried, with the promise that the longitude will be conveyed to him at a future date. When Captain Antifer’s father dies, this document, and the fortune it promises, is passed down to the son. Captain Antifer waits twenty years before an Egyptian notary finally shows up with the longitude. The two coordinates, now united, show that the uncharted island lies in the Gulf of Oman. Accompanied by his nephew Juhel and his best friend Gildas Tregomain, Captain Antifer sets out to find the island and collect his treasure. The Egyptian notary, Ben Omar is also required to make the voyage, to oversee the uncovering of the inheritance and to collect his commission. He brings along his clerk Nazim, a man who is not who he seems and who hopes to steal the treasure for himself.

Although Verne is known these days for his science fiction, this novel is not science fiction but rather geography fiction. One can imagine Verne poring over an atlas as he penned the narrative. The prose often reads like a succession of place names read off of a map. Antifer and company travel from one city to another by boat, train, or horse-drawn coach, throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Verne seems more concerned with the logistics of the journey rather than the places visited. Because of the rapid traveling pace, the reader doesn’t really learn a whole lot about the lands through which Antifer and his friends pass.

The characters are quite likeable, however, which keeps the story engaging. Antifer is a gruff and surly old adventurer who calls to mind Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger. His pal Tregomain is a big, gentle giant and sometimes comic buffoon. Together they give off a kind of Abbott and Costello vibe. Also, as in many a Verne novel, the cast features a pair of young lovers hoping to be married. In this case, it’s Antifer’s niece and nephew, Enogate and Juhel (cousins to each other). All of the globe-hopping travel arrangements in the story tend to get a little monotonous and frustrating, but the clever ending makes up for it. The plot of this novel is very craftily conceived and thoughtfully constructed. And, since Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires were kind of the 19th-century precursor to Atlas Obscura, you end up learning a few fascinating facts about the world as well. Outside of his big hits like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, many of Verne’s adventure novels have faded into obscurity. Captain Antifer, however, shows once again that it’s worth digging deeper into Verne’s catalog, as such an endeavor sometimes turns up hidden gems.  

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Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick

Captains Outrageous

Following the overland expedition of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific coast of North America, the U.S. government decided to pay some overdue attention to the world’s oceans. Many European nations had already completed globe-circling voyages of discovery, most notably Portugal’s Ferdinand Magellan and Britain’s Captain Cook. After much bureaucratic delay, the United States Exploring Expedition was launched in 1838. In his 2003 book Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick chronicles the adventures, hardships, successes, and failures of the Ex. Ex. (as it shall hereafter be abbreviated). This U.S. Navy endeavor was led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, a skilled surveyor but an inexperienced ship’s captain. The expedition’s main goals were to chart the islands of the Pacific to prevent the shipwrecks of American whalers, survey the Pacific coast of North America at the mouth of the Columbia River, and, in a best-case scenario, confirm the speculated existence of an Antarctic continent.

I like to read books about scientific exploration, such as Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, or the Narrative of Captain Cook’s voyages. That’s what I expected when I picked up this book, and its title and subtitle do little to dispel that expectation. Exploration and discovery, however, is not so much what this book is about. It’s really about what a terrible captain Wilkes was, and how he abused his officers and crew. Philbrick is a naval historian, and this book delves heavily into naval regulations, naval discipline, and naval bureaucracy. Although some distinguished scientists sailed with the expedition, there is really only one short chapter devoted to them and their discoveries. Nevertheless, there are a few exciting episodes of danger from icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean and some harrowing tales of conflict with the Natives of the Pacific islands. Although this wasn’t quite the book I expected, and naval history isn’t really my bag, I found Philbrick’s narrative quite riveting, and he kept me thoroughly engaged throughout.

The ending of the book is a bit of a disappointment. That’s mostly the fault of history, but a little of the blame falls on Philbrick as well. He spends most of the book asserting what a horrible commander and unlikable human being Wilkes was. By the end of the book, the reader is ready to hang Wilkes from the nearest yardarm for his egregious behavior. In the final few chapters, however, Philbrick relents and delivers a surprisingly flattering assessment of Wilkes. The fact that Wilkes doesn’t get much comeuppance from the U.S. Navy, who predictably favor an officer over his underlings, is not much of a surprise, but the fact that Wilkes doesn’t even get any comeuppance from Philbrick is dissatisfying and strange. Philbrick spurs you on to hate Wilkes for most of the book, then all of a sudden you’re supposed to do a 180 and admire the expedition leader for his bull-headed tenacity. Philbrick criticizes Wilkes for stealing credit from his crew members for the accomplishments of the Ex. Ex., but in the end, Philbrick gives him most of the credit anyway.

Notwithstanding my few quibbles, this book taught me a great deal about the Ex. Ex., and it makes me want to read more about this lesser-known but important escapade in American history. Philbrick provides extensive bibliographic notes for those who want to learn more. For the more scientifically inclined like me, he recommends William Stanton’s The Great United States Exploring Expedition (1975). In addition, the Ex. Ex.’s official publications, including Wilkes’s Narrative and the subsequent scientific volumes, are available for free reading online at HathiTrust, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and other digital repositories.
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