The Journey Begins / Drumbeats of War (Tales of the Sea)
Both these books are described as novels on their covers and in the author’s introductions, but neither are what one would normally expect of a novel. They had their origin in a cache of about 150 letters, written between 1830 and 1870, which the author discovered when clearing out her late mother-in-law’s house in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. West Barnstable was a seafaring town where the menfolk commonly spent the first half of their working lives as long-distance sailors in the big wooden sailing ships voyaging to the Far East, Australia, and elsewhere. Voyages often lasted two years or more, and the letters found by the younger Mrs Elder were mostly letters to home from distant sons and husbands.
Elder reproduces many of the original letters, only lightly edited, and they are fascinating. She has done a service in bringing them to a wider public. But, of course, they are only one side of the correspondence. To give us the other side, Elder interleaves the original letters with snippets of imagined news from West Barnstable narrated in the third person but set out like letters. It is these pieces of creative writing that presumably qualify the books as novels.
The books are beautifully written, both the modern and the 19th-century pieces, but the pace is very slow. The outward voyage to Australia could take six months, and one day was very like another. The central character is Captain James Jenkins who, unusually for the era, takes his wife and daughter aboard ship on his voyages. This leavens the correspondence somewhat as Ruth is more loquacious than her husband but even this cannot make Book Two a page turner. Read both books for their insights into the last great days of sail.
