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Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21940, 14 November 1936, Page 13

SEA VOYAGE

Strange Sea Road. By Warren Bednail. Jonathan Cape. 255 pp. (10s 6d net.)

Warren Bednall, a man with a healthy liking for the sea but with little experience oJf it, sail'd in the four-masted barque C. B. Pedersen from Melbourne to Gothenburg, as a passenger. There were a number of other passengers, including four women, whom the captain, as a last resource, decided to take, cargo for a windjammer being unprocurable. The crew was mainly composed of Finnish boys, learning Seamanship, and one of them was the famous “Boy in the Bathtub,” who deserted this ship in his unorthodox craft and made himself a subject of interest to readers of the cable news a year or so ago. The author has written one of the best stories of the sea ; yet published, alike for the sailor and for the landsman. As a simply written account of a voyage, it has surpassing interest and no little beauty; and though his manner' is almost matter-of-fact the author achieves more dramatic effect than a whole deck-crew of highly excitable fietioneers in the same line:of business. The Pedersen in all truth made a voyage that in the heyday of wind ship navigation would have earned her skipper a reputation for being an artist in his professon. He set but from Melbourne in June, 1935, to sail round the Horn to northern Europe, but head winds continuously and gales not a little of the time made him change his plan entirely when well south of New Zealand, where the ship “seemed likely to stay for ever.” He ran back and navigated through the (for a sailing ship, treacherous waters northabout round Australia through Torres Strait. Luck went with the skipper but so did faultless seamanship, which allowed him to gauge exactly all risks and bring his ship through Without once imperilling her. Naturally a great portion of the book concerns the personalities of the crew and passengers! At the end one shares the unreserved admiration of the author for the shy and well-mannered youths who were the crew. In some degree one fears the skipper, and one is either amused or exasperated by the neurotic behaviour of some of the women passengers,' whose bickerings and jealousies make a shrill discord in these pages. The illustrations are excellently chosen and reproduced.