Something for the Bride

LOGBOOK FOR GRACE (290 pp.)--Robert Cushman Murphy--Macmillan ($4).

The chance of sailing to the Antarctic in a whaling and sealing vessel seemed a fine opportunity--for some other scientist. The year was 1911, Robert Cushman Murphy was only 24, and he wanted nothing to interfere with his wedding the following June. But his girl, with a fine mixture of feminine self-sacrifice and intelligent opportunism, stepped up the marriage date and then loaned her husband for a year to the American Museum of Natural History.

Logbook for Grace is the diary Murphy kept for his wife that year, in place of the letters he could not send. He wrote, besides, 400,000 words of scientific notes which later became 67 separate articles and the two-volume classic Oceanic Birds of South America. But the Logbook, written for a bride, is a passing delight that any layman can savor. It has much of the informed curiosity of Charles Darwin's famed Voyage of the Beagle.

A Year's Profit: $250. The 383-ton brig Daisy was one of the last of the tough New Bedford whalers. Her crew of 34, mostly Cape Verde Islanders, lived under conditions that had hardly changed since Richard Dana put in his two years before the mast. At the end of the bruising year's voyage, each man's share in the whale and seal oil might run to $250. Before it was over, some would die of malnutrition, drowning and exposure to the Antarctic. All of this seemed wholly natural to them and to their captain. It didn't to young Naturalist Murphy. He was alternately amused and shocked by the skipper, a Puritan who drove his men to death and freely broke the whaling laws for profit but could not abide swearing in the fo'c'sle. He warned that "he'll be goddamned if he'll stand for one such word from any Christless bastard on board, afore or abaft the mainmast."

Young Murphy shipped as "assistant navigator" (a title customarily reserved for whaling skippers' wives who came along for the ride), and he was cut in for 1/200th of the profits. But his real job was to collect bird, fish and plant life for the Museum. He came back with many a specimen never before seen in U.S. collections. He also noted every move that went into whaling and sealing, and occasionally pitched in with the crew when the work piled up. The result: one of the clearest blow-by-blow accounts ever set down of a once-great U.S. industry.

Logbook for Grace was Dr. Murphy's answer to his publishers' request for an autobiography. With eleven generations of Long Islanders and New Englanders behind him, he grew up only five miles from Setauket Harbor (L.I.), where the Daisy was launched in 1872. At 60, Author Murphy is now chairman of the Department of Birds in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, honorary president of The National Association of Audubon Societies. As for the Daisy, she sprang a leak while carrying a cargo of beans to Europe in 1916. The water-swelled beans bulged her decks, sprung her planking, rent her hull and sent the aged whaler to the bottom.

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