Chapter VI: The Sea Stories

FROM _THE PILOT_ TO _MILES WALLINGFORD_

_The Pilot_ is an imaginary episode in the life of John Paul Jones. Cooper has given his hero a poetic character. ‘Mr. Gray’ applies science to the problem before him up to the critical moment, and then trusts to intuition, to his genius, and finds wind and wave owning him their master. The new note is in the vivid descriptive passages, couched in terms of practical seamanship, but so graphically put that the most ignorant of lubbers can be depended on to read with a quickened pulse. Notable among these are the rescue of the frigate from the shoals, and the fight between the ‘Alacrity’ and ‘Ariel.’

There is much human nature in the speech of the men if not of the women. The dialogue between Borroughcliffe and Manual would not shame books more celebrated for humor than _The Pilot_. Vast refreshment can be found in the racy and picturesque talk of Long Tom Coffin, the most original character in Cooper’s gallery of seamen; also in that of Boltrope, who from an early ‘prejudyce’ against knee-breeches (he somehow always imagined Satan as wearing them) never became fully reconciled to the ship’s chaplain until that worthy left off ‘scudding under bare poles’ and garbed himself like other men. Dillon, the lawyer, is too obviously the scoundrel. As the ‘Cacique of Pedee,’ however, he serves a good end. His kinsman, Colonel Howard, walks the stage with dignity, a worthy specimen of the loyalist of the American Revolution, and typical of the class for whom Cooper had much sympathy.

The young women are far from being lay figures. They have beauty, intelligence, courage, even audacity. That they are too perfect in feature, form, manner, was a defect common to all fiction of the time; the art of making a heroine of a plain woman was in its infancy. Cooper, who could describe a girl, had always a deal of trouble to make her talk. Did he never listen to the conversation of those interesting creatures known, in the parlance of his day, as ‘females’? Would Alice Dunscombe, meeting her lover after a separation of six years, have used the phrases Cooper put into her lips? All these young women might with justice have complained that the speaking parts assigned them were not representative. But they were at the author’s mercy and did as they were told.

Cooper’s principal biographer, to whom we are all vastly indebted, says that ‘the female characters of his earlier novels are never able to do anything successfully but faint.’ This is unfair. Katherine Plowden, a brunette beauty, whom Professor Lounsbury has allowed himself to forget, goes habited _en garçon_ to seek her lover, and does not faint when she finds him, only laughs like the gay Rosalind she is.

The story of ‘Mr. Gray the pilot’ is good, but _The Red Rover_ is better. Cooper gave the public something new in pirates. The old-fashioned corsair, in theatrical phrase, looked his part. He swore horribly, was awful to behold, black-whiskered, visibly blood-stained, a walking stand of arms, like the monsters described in Esquemeling’s _Buccaneers of America_. Unlike L’Olonnois, of evil memory, the captain of the ‘Dolphin’ is almost a Brummell; his cabin is a boudoir, and he has the wit to eschew the old-fashioned device of skull and cross-bones. One is inclined, however, to laugh when the pirate ‘throws his form on a divan’ and bids music discourse. The Rover was somewhat given to posing, and in moments of deep thought wore a ‘look of faded marble.’

There is nothing fantastic in Wilder, the young captain, and nothing to be desired in his handling of the ‘Royal Caroline.’ The description of the flight before the strange cruiser is a splendidly nervous piece of writing. From the moment when the Bristol trader disentangles herself from the slaver’s side in the harbor of Newport until she becomes a wreck on the high seas and the diabolical pursuer passes like a hurricane, the interest is cumulative.

The book has its quota of garrulous old salts, some of whom talk too much, others not enough. ‘Mister Nightingale’ promises well, but has little of value to say after his discourse anent the quantity of sail a ship may carry in a white squall off the coast of Guinea. The reader will find amusement in the other characters, notably Fid and that strange being, Scipio Africanus.

_The Water-Witch_ concerns a mysterious and beautiful smuggling brigantine with a wonderful gift for eluding Her Majesty’s revenue cruiser under command of Captain Ludlow. The time is the close of Lord Cornbury’s administration, the scene, New York harbor and the adjacent estuaries. The story is fantastic and melodramatic, and the dialogue stilted, even for Cooper. Compared with _The Red Rover_, a romance like _The Water-Witch_ is hard reading. With such characters as Alderman Van Beverout, Alida de Barbérie, and ‘Seadrift’ with her epicene beauty, it is not surprising that _The Water-Witch_ should have been dramatized.

_The Two Admirals_ is an engaging picture of manly affection. He who has made the acquaintance of Sir Gervaise Oakes and his friend Richard Bluewater is to be congratulated, for a more sterling-hearted pair of worthies is seldom to be found. Other pleasant company may be had for the asking; the aged baronet Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, hospitable to excess, bemoaning the inconvenience of not having a satisfactory heir, and wondering why his brother never married, though he had never given himself the trouble to undergo the discipline of wedlock. Agreeable in their several ways are Mildred Dutton, Wycherly Wychecombe the young Virginian, and Galleygo the top man turned steward, he of the picturesque language. The story has a conventional plot, and one is supposed to be eager to know the validity of the Virginian’s claim to the ancient estate of the Wychecombes. The plot is in danger of being forgotten when Cooper carries his people to sea, and describes the action between French and English fleets off Cape la Hogue.

_Wing-and-Wing_ relates the adventures of a French privateer in the Mediterranean in 1798. One has not to read far before becoming enamoured of the diabolical little lugger and her audacious captain. As creatures of romance go, the good-humored and handsome Raoul Yvard (alias ‘Sir Smees’) is real and attractive. His arguments with Ghita (they talk theology not at all after the manner of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s characters) move one to turn the pages hurriedly. Raoul may be forgiven; Ghita drove him to it, being orthodox and fond of proselyting. One can always take refuge with the vice-governatore and the podestà. These worthies are long-winded, but it were unfair to call them dull.

Ithuel Bolt, that long-legged, loose-jointed son of the Granite State, is new in Cooper’s gallery of seamen. He makes an interesting figure in the wine-shop at Porto Ferrajo, his chair, creaking under his weight, tipped back on two legs against the wall, the uprights digging into the plaster, his knees apart, ‘you fancy how,’ and his long arms over the backs of neighboring chairs, giving him a resemblance to a spread eagle. Next to the wine of the country, which he abuses while succumbing to its influence, he detests the saints. Filippo, the Genoese sailor, undertakes a feeble defence. Says the Yankee: ‘A saint is but a human--a man like you and me, after all the fuss you make about ’em. Saints abound in my country, if you’d believe people’s account of themselves.’ Cooper says that Bolt, after his return to America, became a deacon. This is no more incredible than the statement that he also became a teetotaler.

The pages of old reviews would probably show how Cooper’s delineation of Englishmen affected English readers. Our cousins over the water must have been difficult if they quarrelled with the spirit in which the portraits of Cuffe, Griffin, Winchester, and Clinch were painted, all being good men and true in their various capacities. In describing Nelson and the ‘Lady Admiraless’ the novelist undertook a difficult task. He was adroit enough to avoid bringing the famous beauty too often on the stage.

_Afloat and Ashore_ and _Miles Wallingford_ form a continuous story of almost a thousand pages. There is a mixture of love and adventure, the love being depicted as Cooper usually does it, neither better nor worse, and the sea-episodes as only Cooper could do them.

A capital passage in _Afloat and Ashore_ is that describing the encounter with the savages off the coast of South America. Even more spirited are those chapters of _Miles Wallingford_ in which the young captain of the ‘Dawn’ relates how he was overhauled successively by a British man-of-war, a French privateer, and a piratical lugger, and how he escaped them all only to be wrecked at last in the Irish Sea. Among a dozen or so of characters Marble is a typical Cooper seaman, a man of many resources, as witness how he outwitted Sennit. He was patriotic too, and on his first visit to London was chagrined at being obliged to admit that St. Paul’s was better than anything they had in Kennebunk.