Books: Fiction & Family History

THE RUNNING OF THE TIDE (632 pp.)—Esther Forbes—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

The unpredictable Crowninshields, merchant mariners of Salem (Mass.), deserve a place of their own in New England history. They built one of the great fortunes of post-Revolutionary days, went cruising to the Mediterranean in a fabulous pleasure boat named Cleopatra’s Barge, and fervently supported Thomas Jefferson. One Crowninshield hanged himself on the eve of his trial in a sensational murder case. Another left an account of his travels (Journal of Captain John Crowninshield at Calcutta, 1797-1798, When Master of the Ship Belisarius*) that is far better than most fiction.

The Crowninshield saga was bound to suggest a novel to somebody, some day. The Running of the Tide, by Esther Forbes (Book-of-the-Month for October and winner of one of the 1947 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 novel contests), is it.

Her hero, Ralph (“Dash”) Inman, 24, and a captain from the age of 19, is grey and tense when the book opens because he has lost a ship. The Running of the Tide is the story of his triumphant vindication in command of another ship (the fastest in the world) on a three-year voyage to Batavia and Japan, salting away more than $100,000 a year.

The rest of the story concerns the hero’s love affairs and other tried & true situations and characters familiar in historical romances: old Madam Inman, the head of the clan; the malicious Federalists and Jefferson’s Embargo Act; the great storm at sea; the brilliant and hysterical girl; the cheers when the long-overdue ship reaches Salem harbor again. The Running of the Tide is no worse than most historical novels, but no better either.

* Published in 1945 by the Essex Institute (75¢). Most famous contemporary member of the family was the late Frank Crowninshield, urbane (and unpredictable) art critic and onetime editor of Vanity Fair (TIME, Jan. 5), who sometimes spoofed secretarial job hunters by showing them pictures of gauze-draped dancers, remarking, “This is what we do Saturday afternoons.”