The Stowaway

Having scarpered from school, absented himself from his apprenticeship to ‘The Butcher’ and fled from his family, free spirit Nick Young stows himself aboard Capt. Cook’s ship, Endeavour, bound for the Pacific. And here young Nick’s adventures really begin. Written in the form of a journal, The Stowaway records his circumnavigation of the globe in this, the first of Cook’s three voyages to chart waters and claim lands in the King’s name.

In such an exceptional voyage, dramatic incidents abound. One of the most successful passages, perhaps, is the bit where, leagues from land, the ship grounds itself and takes on water. Here the journal entries are most sustained and the tension of the situation is fully exploited. Corkscrewed by coral, the sailors throw ballast overboard in a desperate attempt to lighten the vessel and so ease it off the snagging reef. But to no avail – the rising tide fails to free them. Eventually, however, and with Apollo 13-like ingenuity, a sail caulked with oakum is looped under the ship to plug the hole, enabling the Endeavour to limp into port for repairs.

Despite the immediacy of the journal form, the drama of what it is like, as an 11-year-old, to hang from the whistling rigging in perilously pitching seas is not, I feel, convincingly captured. Other potentially emotionally charged ‘set-pieces’, such as Cat-o’-nine-tails floggings, the rituals of ‘crossing the line’ and confrontations with unbiddable locals are similarly under-developed, perhaps in a striving for journalistic verisimilitude. That said, with its useful map (Where is ‘Batavia’?), glossary (What is ‘fothering’?) and Afterword (Did Nick Young really exist?) to finish, the novel may not have the symbolic resonance of a Conrad story or the elemental energy of a Turner painting, but it’s a readable romp nonetheless.