Books: Sea Yarn

LONG PENNANT—Oliver La Farge— Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Author La Farge is making the most of his map. His 1929 Pulitzer Prize novel (Laughing Boy) was laid in the U. S. Southwest; Sparks Fly Upward took Central America for its scene; in Long Pennant he follows the fortunes of Rhode Island privateers of 1812 coming home from a long cruise. Readers who like their melodrama with a dash of historicity, a seasoning of salty nautical gab, should enjoy Author La Farge’s latest. The armed brig Glimpse, Jonas Dodge, Master, was three years out of Chog’s Cove, R. I. She had had some close escapes from British cruisers; her crew had a fat share of prize money coming to them. Their last capture, a sloop flying the Spanish flag, they discovered too late was a U. S. vessel. Of the prize crew of four men put aboard her, one was drowned in a hurricane, one died of tropical fever; the other two were shipwrecked. When the Glimpse got safely home again Captain Dodge paid off the survivors, held the missing men’s share a year. But it was longer than that before the castaways escaped from their Indian rescuers, then from the fleshpots of New Orleans, and worked their long way home.