SHANGHAI'D

In Burdick’s historical novel, the 1848California Gold Rush is the jumping-off point for many more death-defying adventures for young Bostonian Joshua Cabot.

Before the news of a gold strike gets out, a powerful Boston entrepreneur recruits 24-year-old Joshua to open an assay office in California, which he does. He also marries and has a child, but after a tragedy, he spirals downward, takes to drink, kills his boss (in self-defense), and wakes up an abductee aboard a merchant ship—the Pacifica, captained by a man named Mathius Stark. It heads north to Alaska, where mutineers have taken over the Russian outpost in Archangel (today’s Sitka), but Joshua and others turn the tables and make off with weapons and a fortune in tusk ivory. They sail to the South Sea, but not before foiling a mutinous plot and keelhauling the instigator. Then comes Lahaina in the Sandwich Islands, where he meets a desperate, sexually abused 16-year-oldgirl, Maka, who finds a way to join the Pacifica crew. At succeeding ports, they confront a wide range of villains; through it all, Joshua forms bonds with his crewmates, and by using his intelligence and skills—he knows medicine and metallurgy—he earns their respect. In the final scene, crewmembers head out to the dangerous hinterlands of China, and readers may want to remain onboard for a potential sequel. Some of the exploits in Burdick’s novel are so improbable that one may need to take them with a grain of salt or two, but the swashbuckling-adventure tropes in play effectively give the author a lot of leeway to pursue a tale of wilder circumstances. Overall, though, this isn’t a book to analyze, but rather one in which to lose oneself, as the prose is dense in detail and steeped in atmosphere (“Gradually, they felt the fury of the storm begin to lessen, and the sky went from an ominous night-like darkness, to light gray”). Indeed, readers will come away with the impression that this is a book by a writer who is clearly having fun.

A worthy contribution to its genre, tailor-made for armchair Indiana Joneses.