Voyage: A Novel of 1896

Three loosely connected stories that converge in the City of San Francisco. First, the voyage of Neptune's Car, a four-masted barque that sails from New York with a load of coal and about twenty-five souls. The story of its passage around Cape Horn is gripping and I loved every minute of it.

Second

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is the story of the Presidential Election of 1896, pitting William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, and big-money interests against the populist-progressive elements that want to remake America into a worker's paradise. While interesting, it wasn't as good as the main story, and probably didn't get the full telling that it deserved.

Third is the story of a group of well-heeled aristocrats who journey by yacht across the Pacific to witness a total eclipse in Japan. They visit Honolulu on both legs of their voyage and end up in San Francisco just as the election is taking place and just before Neptune's Car arrives there as well. I found these sections to be completely frivolous and wish they hadn't been included.

There is also a fourth (minor) story that crops up now and then about the attempt to unionize the merchant marine in California. Nothing much seems to come of this.

There are some great characters here, mainly the crew of Neptune's Car, and I almost wish their voyage hadn't ended. Sadly, when it does the story kind of peters out and there isn't a whole lot of resolution, or if there is I didn't understand it.

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trip of 2 ships around Cape Horn + Hawaii. Clipper Ship.

Voyage is a giant of a novel that works hard to say some very profound things about America at the end of the 19th century and, by implication, about America in the 1970s (and even in the present). Mainly this works, but there are a few longueurs where the polemic shoulders its way to the front and

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we lose some of the narrative drive. This is an important book written by someone who knew about and cared deeply about the world of the merchant sailor and presents an unblinking picture of life at sea at this time.

We follow two long simultaneous sea voyages. The first and most prominent is the maiden voyage of the Neptune's Car, a steel-hulled sailing ship, from New England to San Francisco with a cargo of coal. Written from the points of view of the Captain and the crew we see how hard, arbitrary and ruthless life was on these ships and how casual tyranny and an indifference to the working man's lot caused unnecessary suffering and drove a wedge between worker and management that ultimately destroyed the effectiveness of their endeavours. The second voyage, much more sketchily drawn (perhaps because this was a world the author did not experience or want to enjoy), describes a return cruise across the Pacific from San Francisco to Japan, part honeymoon, part private scientific expedition, part rich idlers' extravaganza, and is used mainly as a counterpoint to the Neptune's Car.

The professional sailors are sympathetically drawn and their own internal rough justice never down-played. As the horrors of their voyage grow they plot the downfall of their Captain and the ship's owner (recognising that the Captain is ultimately only an employee). As they arrive in San Francisco most of the crew immediately forget their complaints as they are paid off and dive into the fleshpots of the city. A small group decide to act.

Sterling Hayden started out a professional sailor, fell into acting where he spent twenty years making a raft of generally well-received movies, dropped out in the 1960s and returned to acting in the 1970s through to his death in 1986. He spent World War II as a sailor for the OSS working primarily behind enemy lines in the Mediterranean theatre.

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