HAZARDOUS VOYAGE

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 60, 4 December 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

HAZARDOUS VOYAGE

Adventures of a Film Star

"Beam Ends,” by Errol Flynn (London: Cassell).

The adventures in which Errol Flynn, star of “Captain Blood,” “The Charge of tlie Light Brigade” and “The Prince and the Pauper,” has participated on the sets at Hollywood, have not by any means been his sole experience of excitement and danger. Before his successful film career began he had strayed far from the beaten track, wandered through the South Seas, prospected ror gold in New Guinea, made his way moneyless across the Australian continent, and, to come to the particular concern of this book, sailed from Sydney to New Guinea in a fifty-year-old cutrer which had never been intended for voyaging outside harbour waters. In “Beam Ends,” Errol Flynn tells the story of that hazardous voyage, and tells it unusually well in a racy narrative full of incident, dramatic and lighthearted happenings, with a sobering shock of tragedy to end it. He had three companions on the trip—Trelawny Adams, commonly called the Dook, a graduate in engineering from Cambridge University, and two others with surnames unmentioned, Rex, a philanderer, having a way with women, and a young Manxman called Charlie. Off they set in the Sirocco, “a long, slender splinter of a boat,” forty-four feet at the water line, cutter rigged. Her first experience of the open sea was nearly her last, but by incessant use of the pump she was kept afloat and they made Coff's Harbour. The next excitement was a suicidal crossing of the oar at the mouth of the Richmond River, attempted and accomplished in defiance of signal instructions from the shore. The following stages, to Brisbane and on to Bundaberg, where they spent a bright carnival week, were uneventful. En route to Gladstone, the next port of call, they began to see the first signs of the Great Barrier Reef, where they were to spend idyllic days. But first came a riotous time in Rockhampton, where they encountered another carnival, and a bout of malaria for the author, which put him in Townsville hospital. At Cairns they did a little opium smuggling. Cooktown, with its herds of goats wandering among deserted buildings, was their last contact with the mainland before attempting the passage of the dreaded Coral Sea.

Exhausted by constant work at the pump, they reached New Guinea after three desperate days of battling against a gale. For the next fortnight they followed the coast toward Port Moresby, and then disaster came. When within two days’ sail of their goal, a sudden storm drove the boat on to a reef. Rex, Charlie and the author, reached the shore safely; the Dook was never seen again. And so ended in tragedy a voyage undertaken haphazardly and carried out in carefree fashion, an adventure which makes a constant appeal to the reader by its very irresponsibility and the infinite capacity of its participants for letting the morrow take care of Itself.