Books: Trick Hurricane

IN HAZARD—Richard Hughes—Harper ($2.50).

Let a novelist describe a hurricane at sea and straightway critics raise a hue because his hurricane is a pale imitation of the one Joseph Conrad described 35 years ago in Typhoon. The difference is put down to Conrad’s superior literary talents. Actually, hurricanes were fiercer in Conrad’s day; that is to say, sailing ships ran into more of them. Modern steamers, tipped off by radio, usually steer clear of them—no difficult matter, since hurricanes travel across open sea at no more than 15 m.p.h.* Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica (originally published in the U.S. as The Innocent Voyage}, a perversely humorous best-seller of 1929, contrives the tale of a British tramp steamer which avoided one hurricane and ran smack into its undetected twin. Having thus ingeniously outwitted the meteorologists, he challenges Conrad with a tale that for excitement (and, at times, for skill) matches Typhoon. The Archimedes, a trim, 9,000-tonoil-burning freighter, westbound from New York, hits the trick hurricane two days out of Colon. This is on Thursday. By Sunday, when the hurricane abates, the Archimedes is a shambles and the crew has gone through an experience calculated to turn even Conrad’s seamen green around the gills. A hurricane begins when wind velocity reaches 75 miles an hour. On the second day the Archimedes, its rudder gone, is broadside in a 200-mile blow and the barometer has dropped out of sight. Hatch covers are sucked off like corks out of a bottle. The funnel is gone, the boilers flooded; there is no food, no water, no light. The Chinese crew is huddled in a corner like a half-dead pile of fish. The officers, although still on their feet, are as helpless as the Chinese, give off just as sharp an odor of ammonia—the smell of fear. Only two of them are actually reduced to green-faced semiconsciousness but by the end of the third day all of them have queer hallucinations—the pleasantest are those of a young junior officer who, as he pours oil through the aft latrine, chatters away to a naked debutante he met in Norfolk a few days earlier.

Author Hughes protests that In Hazard is not really a book about a storm, but about fear. That he conveys plenty of fear, tense readers will admit. But what will stick in most minds are the sharp descriptive passages—of a momentary lull when sea birds descend on the decks like mosquitoes, their only sound the crunching they make as they are crushed underfoot; of a scene, illuminated by lightning, when the crew looks out on a mountainside of water crawling with sharks.

*Last fortnight’s was unusually fast, its centre moving 45 m.p.h.