Tall-Drink Reading

THE CAPTAIN FROM CONNECTICUT --C. S. Forester--Little, Brown ($2.50).

The Captain from Connecticut, which recently appeared in abbreviated form in the Saturday Evening Post, contains a larger percentage of trash than Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower and To the Indies, which contained almost none. But it is the best tall-drink reading of the season so far.

Forester takes his first American hero from a heroic era of U.S. sea power--the days of Perry, John Paul Jones and Old Ironsides. Captain Josiah Peabody, commander of the U.S. frigate Delaware in the War of 1812, rather strongly suggests Gary Cooper.

In a superbly composed opening sequence, he takes the Delaware up Long Island Sound through a raging blizzard and the British blockade. From then on his is one of very few American ships at large on the Atlantic, against the greatest naval power the world has ever seen. His business: to make the British all the trouble he can while he can. The end is all but certain death; the interim, the most intelligent possible use of "Providence"--i.e., the weather.

This business carries the Captain southward into 18 weeks of Caribbean sea maneuvers and sea fights, until Providence traps him at last in Martinique. Love rears her head just far enough to make a good story taste like magazine cereal--but only for a while.

C. S. Forester knows his ships and how they are handled, and he uses that knowledge as the blood and bone of his action. He never just blows up a loud atmosphere of adventure; every stratagem, every seafaring event is an intricate equation of courage, technique and sea-chance. He could make the sea exciting to a sailor, and its ways understandable to the harbor master of an Iowa graveyard.

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