Log Book

ADVENTURES BY SEA OF EDWARD COXERE (190 pp.)--Oxford ($2.50).

Back in the century when the King James Bible was hot off the press, and England and Holland fought for New Amsterdam, Seaman Edward Coxere spun the hair-raising story of his life in simple-seaman's language, and sewed the quires shipshape in vellum. Rats alone chewed over the MS. until 1940, when it was unearthed by a London book dealer.

Adventures by Sea is more curio than classic, but it has the natural charm of a genuine, if unimportant, antique. Coxere (pronounced Coxery) was a cut above the average 17th Century Jack Tar (e.g., he spoke four languages fluently). Like most of his contemporaries, he wrote phonetically--"yeuneuerseti" for university, "yeumer" (humor), "bin" (been), "westinges" (West Indies). Born in Kent, in 1633, he became coxswain and gunner aboard merchantmen whose loads ranged from Newfoundland cod to indigo, currants and muscadine wine. Between voyages: "[I] took large liberty in drinking and sporting as the manner of seamen generally is."

Fiqhter Turned Quaker. But Ned Coxere had no patriotic scruples against fighting for whichever flag he chanced to be sailing under. He fought now for King, now for Parliament, in the English Civil War. When he was a prisoner aboard a Spanish man o' war, one of his captors "looks down the scuttle where we were and called in Spanish to us 'There is good news: Cromwell is dead. There is a great feast in hell.' This . . . was good news to the Spaniards, for he made them cheap." On another voyage, from the Barbary Coast, his ship escaped the Greeks ("a murdering sort of people") only to fall into the hands of the Turks, who made slaves of Coxere and his mates--"in chains, two and two together. . . . Several nations of us ... and all lousy." After 20 years of such experiences, along with savage sea battles and shipwrecks, Ned Coxere turned Quaker, quit the sea--and served a spell in a Dover jail as a religious heretic.

News of Ned. Editor E. H. W. Meyerstein has doctored Coxere's prose to a point where it is comprehensible, but he has let it retain its near-Biblical simplicity. A good sample is Coxere's account of his coming home, accompanied by an old neighbor, after years at sea, still wearing a Flemish sailor's clothes:

"[The old man] takes his cloak and we walked together down till we came pretty near home, when I saw my mother in the street with another woman. . . . My mother, spying of us, says to the other woman, 'Here come Master Debase with a Fleming. It may be they may bring some news of Ned, she little knowing I was he. The old man bid me say nothing, he being pleased at the conceit [joke]. When we came to my mother, she looked on me, but knew me not, but asked the old man if he could tell no news of her child. ... The old man bid her patience; she should well hear. This was to her but the old tone, I suppose. I discerned the yearning bowels of a mother, yet notwithstanding I kept myself undiscovered awhile, till at last I made myself known with much joy and gladness."

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