Summer Notables

By Timothy Foote

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN

by SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON

299 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $10.

More than any other man Samuel de Champlain helped create Quebec as a bastion of French commitment to the New World. He made 23 perilous voyages from France to Canada in the years just after the turn of the 17th century. He navigated the coast of New England down as far as Cape Cod, and pursued inland lakes and rivers to their sources exploring New France. He could not swim. He never managed to learn any Indian language. He had almost no sex life. But he could digest anything. He was also brave and resourceful, as well as the best mapmaker and navigator of his age.

For Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, a World War II admiral and a private yachtsman, Champlain would be a hero for the last two qualities alone. Like Francis Parkman, who tried to traverse all the lands and waters he wrote histories about, Morison has retraced Champlain's paths, starting as a young man in 1906 when he sailed along the French explorer's routes off Nova Scotia and down the New England coast, growing more and more admiring as he remarked how accurate Champlain's soundings and descriptions of such harbors as Plymouth and Gloucester still were after 300 years. In case anyone should doubt, Morison reproduces many of Champlain's highly decorative as well as informative charts, and some of the great explorer's fine sketches of such things as Indian attacks and French settlements. The drawings seem remarkably realistic, although he was not above sketching in an occasional palm tree on the shores of Lake Champlain. Morison roundly deals with the foolishness of the French crown, the vagaries of the fur trade, the hardihood of explorers (imagine mosquitoes swarming inside your steel breastplate) and the rigors of Indian cuisine.

WIMBLEDON, A CELEBRATION

by JOHN McPHEE and ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

128 pages. Viking. $14.95.

About oranges and ecology--subjects on which he has also written--critical opinion of John McPhee may be divided. But he is by far the best tennis writer ever, and this illustrated book demonstrates that skill nearly as well as McPhee's earlier book, Levels of the Game. That classic turned Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner into the Hector and Achilles of a center-court Trojan War, and left readers as absorbed, and exhausted, as if they had just sweated and stroked and prayed their way through a lifetime of championship tennis.

This time McPhee splendidly records the sights and inhabits the psyches of a dozen or so great players at key moments during the 1970 matches at Wimbledon. His triumph, though, is a portrait of Robert Twynam, senior groundsman, who for years has exhorted the Wimbledon grass to grow, almost blade by blade. For Twynam, the empyrean racket men of the age are mainly classified as "toe-draggers, sliders or choppers," in relation to how their profane tennis shoes carve up England's most pruned and perfect piece of greensward.

Alfred Eisenstaedt's photographs are fine, but it is unfortunate he did not cover the same Wimbledon year that McPhee describes.

THE HUDSON RIVER AND ITS PAINTERS

by JOHN K. HOWAT;

foreword by CARL CARMER

207 pages. Viking. $25.

This well-meaning volume is something between an illustrated catalogue and a cheerful portfolio. It presents the great river from New York Harbor to the Adirondacks in 102 color scenes, most of them reproductions of famous or forgotten painters of the 19th century, when the Hudson River School was flourishing. Many names are predictable: Thomas Cole, George Inness, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Doughty. So are the scenes of shad fishermen, Hudson River sloops, the Palisades, West Point, etc. Their quality naturally varies, not merely as to the paintings but to reproduction; yet the overall range in style, technique and composition is remarkable. Perfectly suited to readers who know the Hudson, or who have returned, out of ecological piety, to something like a Romantic notion of the inspiriting qualities of landscape.

Proceeds from the book are going to the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference.

WHEN I PUT OUT TO SEA

by NICOLETTE MILNES WALKER

191 pages. Stein & Day. $6.95.

Nicolette Milnes Walker, 28, is a brisk British girl who describes herself as a humanist and hedonist and claims to make decisions by balancing pleasure against conscience. When these conflict too horrendously she flips a coin for or against; but instead of abiding by the toss she analyzes whether or not she is happy with the result and if not, overthrows the coin's decision. Perhaps following such methods--though she admits wanting to get away from it all and to impress men--Nicolette decided to sail all alone across the Atlantic.

With minimum fuss she quit her job as a psychologist, bought a sloop called Aziz and, last year, made the trip from Wales to Newport, R.I., in 45 days. She was only the third woman to try, the second to succeed.

She writes well about the daily staples of such a trip--neighborly whales and nautical loneliness, gale-force blasts and the odd flying fish landing on deck just in time for breakfast. As skipper she found settling into routine at sea like settling into a new London flat. With no suggestion of gush, she conveys flashes of femininity, reflecting, for instance, on the psychological therapy of perfume even alone at sea. There comes a moment when the disheartened sailor seriously considers turning back but does not, in part because she could just hear those consoling male voices saying "Jolly good effort, for a woman."

She was also, she admits, afraid of having to live with her own cowardice afterward. During one tremendous storm, she called on God for help but afterward reflected that the call had been forced from her in desperation. It was not made, she concludes, in a religious spirit, with faith that it might be effective. "I know what prayer should be," concludes Nicolette, "and my cries did not resemble prayer in any meaningful way." All in all she makes a fine singlehanded sailing companion for any reader.

Timothy Foote

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