BRAVE SAILING DAYS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 5, 7 January 1928, Page 21

BRAVE SAILING DAYS

"Tho Flying Kestrel." By Captain Dingle. 'New York: G. Howard Watt. (Through Dymock's, Sydney). Captain Darling is a shipmaster with sail and steam experience, to which is added a fluent and graphic pen. He tells how the Kestrel, a stately ship, all sculptured ivory in the sun," flod homeward before the gale, passing steamers, and leaving them well down, had Val Orson as her master, her lover in point of fact. For the ship Val Orson vrould have given his life; for his crew he had hard words, driven home with'a belaying pin. But Orson could, and did, make that ship go. Once she had been a sea-clipper, one of the fleetest of the fleet, and then she was sold to foreign owners. It was after that —when steam was more and more asserting itself in all oceans, that Orson came by the Kestrel. He overhauled and refitted her, and made a yacht of her. So far as cleanliness and order went, never a rope yarn out of place, every bit of bright work kept as if the ship were new from the builder's hands. She became a ship "full of vibrant life, clothed to the dog-vane with gleaming canvas, a rainbow in tho, shattered spray at her golden figurehead, milk-white foam at her lee bow and lean flank, and the sunlight singing in every glistening line of her oiled spars and tarred rigging." But Orson is a hard man with his crew. Stinking beef he gave them to eat—he was "a man-killer, but he spared himself not more than ho spared others, and he did not spare his ship crowding on to the yards the utmost inch of canvas, forcing her through the storm, the growing seas, tho showers of sleet. With shanghaied and angry men saw tho danger coming, the certainty of snapped masts, and the crash of tangled rigging. Trouble came; but Orson carried on. This is a thrilling story of the sea, with all its horrors of scurvy and starvation, swearing and fighting, and a fierce, mad passage round the Horn. The love interest is not overlooked in the story, and wild Orson is married on deck within a few minutes by his order to "clew up," the parson clambering aboard in answer to the signals for a clergyman and a doctor. This is a real salt-sea story which seamen will appreciate.