Trick Hurricane

IN HAZARD--Richard Hughes--Harper ($2.50).

Let a novelist describe a hurricane at sea and straightway critics raise a hue because his hurricane is a pale imitation of the one Joseph Conrad described 35 years ago in Typhoon. The difference is put down to Conrad's superior literary talents. Actually, hurricanes were fiercer in Conrad's day; that is to say, sailing ships ran into more of them. Modern steamers, tipped off by radio, usually steer clear of them--no difficult matter, since hurricanes travel across open sea at no more than 15 m.p.h.* Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica (originally published in the U.S. as The Innocent Voyage}, a perversely humorous best-seller of 1929, contrives the tale of a British tramp steamer which avoided one hurricane and ran smack into its undetected twin. Having thus ingeniously outwitted the meteorologists, he challenges Conrad with a tale that for excitement (and, at times, for skill) matches Typhoon. The Archimedes, a trim, 9,000-ton oil-burning freighter, westbound from New York, hits the trick hurricane two days out of Colon. This is on Thursday. By Sunday, when the hurricane abates, the Archimedes is a shambles and the crew has gone through an experience calculated to turn even Conrad's seamen green around the gills. A hurricane begins when wind velocity reaches 75 miles an hour. On the second day the Archimedes, its rudder gone, is broadside in a 200-mile blow and the barometer has dropped out of sight. Hatch covers are sucked off like corks out of a bottle. The funnel is gone, the boilers flooded; there is no food, no water, no light. The Chinese crew is huddled in a corner like a half-dead pile of fish. The officers, although still on their feet, are as helpless as the Chinese, give off just as sharp an odor of ammonia--the smell of fear. Only two of them are actually reduced to green-faced semiconsciousness but by the end of the third day all of them have queer hallucinations--the pleasantest are those of a young junior officer who, as he pours oil through the aft latrine, chatters away to a naked debutante he met in Norfolk a few days earlier.

Author Hughes protests that In Hazard is not really a book about a storm, but about fear. That he conveys plenty of fear, tense readers will admit. But what will stick in most minds are the sharp descriptive passages--of a momentary lull when sea birds descend on the decks like mosquitoes, their only sound the crunching they make as they are crushed underfoot; of a scene, illuminated by lightning, when the crew looks out on a mountainside of water crawling with sharks.

*Last fortnight's was unusually fast, its centre moving 45 m.p.h.

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