Invitation to Danger

FEW writers of modern times have succeeded in resurrecting the romance of the clipper ships with as fine a touch as Alfred Stanford, already well known for his authorship of Navigator", the story of Salem's great Nathaniel Bowditch. "Invitation to Danger" deserves its place on the shelf next to that now well known novel.

On this latest of his canvasses, Stanford spreads the New York and Canton of the 18th and the long, arduous miles of water between the two before the building of the Panama Canal and the coming of steam changed these miles hardly less than Canton and New York have changed since those early days of the last century.

New York's commercial aristocrats, the great traders, founders of more than one great American house; New York and New England's ship builders, among them the famous Donald McKay; the Yankee skippers and the hard-bitten tars who hauled their canvass, stood their watch--all these are deftly, subtly portrayed.

Without descending to a technicality which would tax the understanding of more modern seafarers, Stanford nevertheless brings to the pages of his novel a real tang of the sea. His straightforward style, carries forward a tale spread over several years, without omitting anything but unessentials. Compactly, tersely worded, with excellent selection of detail, "Invitation to Danger" has not a single wasted chapter or paragraph.

There is a two-fold romance--that of the sea and that of Dan Bover and Ann Duane, the slim and lovely toast of New York. Bover's unquenchable love of the sea, never satisfied except when he strides the quarterdeck of his ship, and his tortuous pursuit of an elusive but understanding Ann, provide the twin plots underlying the whole structure of the novel.

Into "Invitation to Danger", too, enters that mysticism which never seems lacking in the best books of the sea. The main theme of "The Ancient Mariner", strong in "Moby Dick", is also as evident in every situation of Stanford's latest.

On this foundation, the author builds a singularly pungent tale of ship yards, cotillions, the rigours of a mid-winter passage of the Horn, the frenzy of the Gold Rush, the economics of the China Trade--in short, the spirit of those adventuresome times.