William McFee (1881–1966)

"There was a precision of speech and gesture, a sureness of touch, an expression of energy in repose in the boyish features that is the inalienable heritage of the sea."

Seeking better futures beyond their cheerless and constrained North London lives, Bert turns to soldiering, Minnie explores the Parisian demimonde, and Hanny sails away on a merchant steamer. The writing is uncluttered and fluid, the style leavened with a Dickensian lightness of touch. Once he has Hanny on a ship, McFee -- show more a steamship engineer himself -- opens the valves and charges the story with the details of steam and men and sea that he so clearly loves. He does suffer from a Victorian reticence to allow his characters much emotion, but he is sympathetic and nonjudgmental towards all of them. show less

The strength of the book is its description of how Frobisher, Drake and other captains challenged the primacy of the Spanish on the open seas by exposing Spain's inability to protect the lands it claimed, by disdain and outright piracy. Frobisher was an explorer, not a pirate, but he and most English captains looted Spanish ships if the opportunity came. Queen Elizabeth feigned ignorance of such outrages when King Philip complained, and in fact encouraged it. England couldn't challenge show more Spain's nautical power until late in the 17th Century, when her ships became faster and had better masters than did the clumsy galleons, and Elizabeth had lifted Frobisher and Drake from self-interested adventurers to commanders in her service, ultimately destroying the Armada.

The difficulty here is that there are no accounts of Frobisher that provide information on his personality, so McFee frequently offers suppositions, surmises, and deductions to describe the character of his subject. He cannot round out his man with anecdotes or diaries or remembrances of associates, he can only give him a historical grounding in the time of Elizabeth I,and show where he was and what he was up to. McFee 's thorough knowledge of seafaring and seamanship (he was a mariner himself aboard steamships), and a crisp, unaffected style carry the book along as well as can be managed. show less