Gene Hackman

I picked up this book because I’d seen it mentioned as a “swashbuckling sea adventure” with plenty of action and piracy.
However, reading it, I was reminded that when I was a kid I went through a big phase of reading lots of historical nautical books, both fiction and non-fiction. (There were lots of sailors and sea voyages in my family history, which is where the interest stemmed from… check out THIS BOOK, it features my distant relative getting cannibalized…) So, although I don’t know HOW to sail or anything like that, I feel that I’ve got a pretty good concept of what life was like on a 19th-century sailing ship. And, in this book, I just wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t notice many inaccuracies (other than that I found it hard to believe that on a ship of 26 hands, there would be sailors that ‘didn’t know each other’ after any amount of voyaging…) but I just wanted more details of shipboard life… but, this is a book that doesn’t get bogged down in details or verisimilitude… it actually, I think, would make a very good movie – and I’m sure that must have been in Gene Hackman’s mind when he was working on it. It’s got just about the level of depth and characterization of your average big-budget movie, with plenty of action scenes, local color and exotic locations (all politically-corrected, to a certain degree.)
The story has to do with a young man who takes to the sea after his parents are murdered by a Cuban Count who seizes the family property. He makes friends with another young man, a victim of shipwreck, and together they have seagoing adventures, as he waits for his chance to take revenge… The checklist of Things That Happen At Sea occurs, fairly predictably – the standout scenes are diving scenes, which (considering that Lenihan is a deep-sea diving expert) seem technically very believable, if contextually very unlikely.… (more)