THE WRECK OF ""THE MAID OF ATHENS

Laurence Irving has edited and illustrated with suitably strong and sombre woodcut style the diary of Emily Wooldridge, wife of the Captain of the Maid of Athens, which burned near Cape Horn in 1870. Emily was the only woman on the vessel, and she gives a discerning account of crew, voyage, catastrophe. Then there is the period of isolation and hardship on Staten Island (not New York!), the preparation of the small boats and the run for the Falklands. The tale is told factually, with a kind of calm naturalness, and is of interest chiefly as the experience of a courageous woman in the sailing era. Relations of captain to crew, the loyalty of wife to husband, the terrors of illness, isolation and want seep through the directly written facts and give the book a pleasing depth.