Freedom of the Seas

SALEM FRIGATE--(500 pp.)--John Jennings--Doubleday ($3).

Hard tack and chocolate fudge, manly bellows and girlish squeals are the ingredients of Salem Frigate, which scuds from Cape Ann to the Barbary Coast without a second's worry about the finer points of literary art and navigation. Author Jennings, who wrote 1939's best-selling Next to Valour (TIME, June 12, 1939), is an old hand: he knows how to cram a historical novel full to bursting with blood, sweat and tears, and can wield both cutlass and bobby-pin with sangfroid.

He gets off to a flying start by marrying his two Massachusetts heroes to lovely wenches--the snag being that each man would secretly have preferred the other's wife. So the thwarted, disgruntled husbands join the U.S. Navy (it is the first decade of the 19th Century). They spend most of the book and their own manhood outsmarting piratical Beys and Deys in Tripoli, fleeing over the Nubian desert disguised as Moors, tossing scoundrels to the Deep Six.

When a character begins to slow the plot, Author Jennings shoots him or gives him a fatal tumble from the to'gallants. Wandering around in the background--as though to remind the reader that life in those days was more than just tosspots and sea-chanteys--are Sammy Adams, Tommy Jefferson and old General Washington (ret.).

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