Black Pawl

by Ben Ames Williams

A well-formatted and easy to read edition of Black Pawl."SPIESS, a born lubber who would never learn the way of the sea, bungled his simple share of the task of getting the mate’s boat away. Black Pawl, master of the schooner, was near by; and he cuffed the man. The buffet was good-natured enough, and Black Pawl laughed as he administered it. Nevertheless it knocked Spiess end over end. The man got up, grumbling; and Red Pawl, the captain’s son and mate, said sharply to his “I’ll handle my boat and my men, sir. Let them be.”Black Pawl laughed again. “Fiddle, boy,” he retorted. “If you knew your job, you’d have Spiess trained before this. He’s been thirty months on your hands.”“Keep your fists off my men,” Red Pawl repeated sullenly; and Black Pawl frowned.“Get your boat away,” he ordered. “And stop your mouth.”They had worked into the bay that morning, threading the intricate passages between the islands and the reefs with a familiarity that showed Black Pawl knew his way about. Not that the passage was difficult. There was always room, and to spare; but an ignorant man might well have taken a short way through blue water and piled up on a slumbering reef. Black Pawl was not ignorant, not ignorant where these waters were concerned. He had made this anchorage a full score of times, in his years upon the sea."

188 pages, Nook

First published September 24, 2009

About the author

Ben Ames Williams was born in Macon, Mississippi to Daniel Webster Williams and Sarah Marshall Ames on March 7, 1889. Just after his birth, he and his parents moved to Jackson, Ohio. Because his father was owner and editor of the Jackson Standard Journal in Ohio, Ben Williams grew up around writing, printing, and editing. In high school he worked for the Journal, doing grunt work in the beginning and eventually writing and editing. He attended Dartmouth College and upon graduation in 1910 was offered a job teaching English at a boy’s school in Connecticut. He telegraphed his father seeking career advice, but his handwriting was terrible and his father mistook “teaching” for “traveling” and, not wanting his son to become a traveling businessman, advised him not to take the job. Richard Cary says it later saved Williams from “a purgatory of grading endless, immature English ‘themes’” and propelled him “toward a career as one of the most popular storytellers of his time”. Right after graduation he took a job reporting for the Boston American.

Williams worked hard reporting for the local newspaper, but only did this for income; his heart lay with magazine fiction. Each night he worked on his fiction writing with the aspiration that one day, his stories would be able to support himself, his wife, Florence Talpey, and their children, Roger, Ben, and Penelope. He faced many rejection letters in the beginning of his career, which only drove him to study harder and practice more.

Williams was first published on August 23, 1915 in The Popular Magazine with his short story “Deep Stuff.” After that his popularity slowly grew. He published 135 short stories, 35 serials, and 7 articles for the Saturday Evening Post during a period of 24 years. After the Post took him, other magazines began eagerly seeking Williams to submit his fiction to their magazines.

Williams is perhaps most famous for creating the fictional town of Fraternity, located in rural Maine. 125 of his short stories were set in Fraternity, and they were most popular in the Post. Maine is also the setting for many of his novels.

Williams died of a heart attack in 1953.

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Mbuye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1922, this is the story of a good man gone bad, or perhaps a bad one turned good. Given its psychological insights when the study of the mind was still at an experimental stage, it is really hard to say.

Black Pawl, the captain of a whaling ship, is a sad and conflicted man, whose outward behaviour is that of a merciless bully. To his son, Red Pawl, the mate of his ship, his manner is of the utmost brutality. It is no surprise that his son resents him and the authority he represents to the point of trying to stir up mutiny. Oddly enough, almost to a man, the crew hero-worship Black Pawl, and despite the captain's rough tongue and fist, refuse to join in the mutiny.

Although a whaling ship does not normally take on passengers, Black Pawl makes an exception for an elderly missionary who is escorting a young woman back to Nantucket on the death of her mother, another missionary. As the two one evening exchange their life’s experiences, Black Pawl tells the missionary of his lost wife, who, after giving him two children, elopes with another man, taking her baby daughter with her. “She loved me,” he tells the missionary.

But did she? Was he projecting his own love on her? As we ponder this question, other shipboard dilemmas arise. The hurricane at sea reflects the passions of father and son for the young woman onboard, and brings out the worst in both. As we weave our way through the complicated family tensions, Black Pawl realises that his son had been fashioned by him alone: ”Born in love, but brought up in hate,” as he himself says. All that is vicious, cruel, vindictive and underhanded in his son's character has been the result directly of the training instilled in him by his father. And a further horrific discovery leads him on to his last act of violence, atonement and redemption.