Under Sail

Press, Volume C, Issue 29602, 26 August 1961, Page 3

Under Sail

Tall Ships and Great Captains. By A. B. C. Whipple. Gollancz. 216 pp. Illustrated and indexed.

Mr Whipple’s previous two books, “Yankee Whalers in the South- Seas” and “Pirate,” have established him as a master of sea literature, and “Tall Ships” gives his already high reputation a considerable lift.

He begins by describing the changes in the construction of sailing ships and the technique of sailing—-the sharp lines of the Viking ships, the fatter tubs which came after them, the centuries sipent learning to sail, the arrival of the fully-trigged ship, the great galleons, one of which. Le Grand Francois, had a windmill to power a grindstone, a tennis court, a chapel “done in gilt,” and a forge, and the experiments with new ships in the search for speed Which culminated in the design and building of the privateers, the pirate ships and the clippers. After this preliminary, Mr Whipple tells the stories of the 10 “great specialists” in sail, the caravel Nina which “carried Columbus to the New World”; the San Martin, the flagship of the Armada; the fastest of the pirate ships, the Revenge; Nelson’s Victory; the American frigate Constellation; the fantastic battle between the privateer Prince de Neuchatel and H.M.S. Endymion, which the privateer won, but with only eight of her crew alive. The slaves’ mutiny in the Amistad; the first race for the Americas Cup; the struggle of the Pocahontas to reach the nearest port, 750 miles away, after being rammed by a demented whale; and, lastly, the first voyage of the Flying Cloud which did the run from New York to San Francisco, by way of the Horn, in 90 days—the average time before the clippers was 150 days. Some of the stories are extremely exciting and all of them are vividly written, but perhaps the book's chief quality is that it is an admirable introduction to maritime history. A great many people after reading “Tall Ships” will wish to read more in the same vein on the same subject. The book appeals to a wide audience for it has interest for teen-agers, as much as for middle-aged armchair adventurers.