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Tunnell's Boys
In the middle of the Spanish-American War in 1898, sea pilot Peter Long receives a mysterious request for his services. He is asked to guide a three-masted coasting schooner to the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean. But the ship's master is none other than Ebenezer Soule, Long's rival from their apprentice days aboard the pilot schooner Tunnell.A pacifist Quaker sympathizer, Soule was ousted from the sea pilot service for his activist ways. Despite past rivalries, including competition for the love of a wealthy Quaker ship owner's daughter, Long still views Soule as his hero. However, the Tunnell's crew suspects Soule is a traitor and that Cuba is the schooner's true destination. When Spanish voices are heard in a locked part of the ship's hold, mutiny appears imminent.What unfolds is a story of friendship, competition, and conflict in which Long must look past old feelings and decide where his true loyalties lie.
300 pages, Paperback
First published August 17, 2005
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January 15, 2013
It is 1898 and the country is in the grip of Hearst-fuelled war fever. The schooner Hannah P, Ebenezer Soule, captain, leaves Philadelphia bound for Barbados laden with farm implements. Peter Long, master pilot and the novel’s first-person narrator, is aboard to guide her to the mouth of Delaware Bay. Soule and Long, former comrades, friends and rivals, apprenticed together to be pilots in the schooner Tunnell, but have lost touch since Soule left the pilot service to go to sea ten years earlier. When a storm keeps the take-off boat from its rendezvous off Lewes, Long must stay aboard. He uses the forced idleness to indulge a long-held literary bent and begins writing a memoir of his days on the Tunnell, setting up the novel’s parallel narrative structure -- the backstory of Long and Soule’s youth and the current drama aboard the Hannah P.
Back in the day, Soule and Long came aboard the Tunnell at the same time, and were told that, when the time came, only one of them would be promoted to boatkeeper and ultimately pilot. They were also both smitten with the lovely Quaker, Rachel Powell. Soule, big, handsome, an experienced seaman, quick to act in an emergency and to defend an underdog, lost favor with the girl as well as the piloting board because of his propensity for brawling and his sympathy for the nascent labor unions. The novel is the story of his struggle to curb his impetuous temper and adopt the pacifist ways of the Quaker woman he loves. Long was calculating, conciliatory, a go-along-to-get-along type. Less inclined to think critically, he allowed himself to be swept up in the martial drumbeat against Spain. It’s no surprise that he got the job and Soule got the girl. The passage describing the wedding in a Quaker meeting is a striking coda to Junker’s treatment of the Friends’ Church of the day and the issues faced by its members.
As the memoir brings us closer to the “present,” our attention is increasingly focused aboard the Hannah P where the crew senses that something is amiss. Is the cargo really farm implements? Why is their course shaping more for Cuba than for Barbados? Soule’s Quaker pieties are shouted down as cowardice and even treason. He faces mutiny and capture by the Spanish as Long urges him to take a firm hand, even if it means using violence.
This is also a novel of the sea, full of details about ship handling and shipboard life, as well as action passages in which the crew faces sailors’ nightmares -- squall, fog, hurricanes, lee shores, ice-laden decks and rigging, and a dragging anchor in a crowded harbor. Perhaps the most memorable passage in the book is a long description of Edward Knight, master pilot and Long’s mentor, guiding a British bark up to Philadelphia. Since the wind stayed fair as they made their way up the river, Knight convinced the captain to risk both their careers by waving off the tugboat and attempting a flying moor. Using only rudder and sails, Knight conned the huge craft through the crowded roadstead, across the harbor and brought it to a perfect stop alongside its wharf.
If you enjoy a well-told tale and have an interest in ships and the sea, the Spanish-American War, the Quakers of Philadelphia or the social issues of the Gilded Age, give Tunnell’s Boys a read.
Back in the day, Soule and Long came aboard the Tunnell at the same time, and were told that, when the time came, only one of them would be promoted to boatkeeper and ultimately pilot. They were also both smitten with the lovely Quaker, Rachel Powell. Soule, big, handsome, an experienced seaman, quick to act in an emergency and to defend an underdog, lost favor with the girl as well as the piloting board because of his propensity for brawling and his sympathy for the nascent labor unions. The novel is the story of his struggle to curb his impetuous temper and adopt the pacifist ways of the Quaker woman he loves. Long was calculating, conciliatory, a go-along-to-get-along type. Less inclined to think critically, he allowed himself to be swept up in the martial drumbeat against Spain. It’s no surprise that he got the job and Soule got the girl. The passage describing the wedding in a Quaker meeting is a striking coda to Junker’s treatment of the Friends’ Church of the day and the issues faced by its members.
As the memoir brings us closer to the “present,” our attention is increasingly focused aboard the Hannah P where the crew senses that something is amiss. Is the cargo really farm implements? Why is their course shaping more for Cuba than for Barbados? Soule’s Quaker pieties are shouted down as cowardice and even treason. He faces mutiny and capture by the Spanish as Long urges him to take a firm hand, even if it means using violence.
This is also a novel of the sea, full of details about ship handling and shipboard life, as well as action passages in which the crew faces sailors’ nightmares -- squall, fog, hurricanes, lee shores, ice-laden decks and rigging, and a dragging anchor in a crowded harbor. Perhaps the most memorable passage in the book is a long description of Edward Knight, master pilot and Long’s mentor, guiding a British bark up to Philadelphia. Since the wind stayed fair as they made their way up the river, Knight convinced the captain to risk both their careers by waving off the tugboat and attempting a flying moor. Using only rudder and sails, Knight conned the huge craft through the crowded roadstead, across the harbor and brought it to a perfect stop alongside its wharf.
If you enjoy a well-told tale and have an interest in ships and the sea, the Spanish-American War, the Quakers of Philadelphia or the social issues of the Gilded Age, give Tunnell’s Boys a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review