Skipper's Daughter

THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP--Joan Lowell--Simon and Schuster ($2.75).

The Story. Joan was a landlubber-- for the first eleven months of her life. After that she went aboard her father's four-masted windjammer, a copra-trading schooner in the South Seas, and stayed there until she could stand her trick at the wheel, pull on the ropes, man the pumps, spit, and cuss with the hardest of shellbacks. After an initial mishap with plug tobacco, she "chawed dried prunes which made grand spit," and spit two successful curves on a single windy day. Aged seven, she further qualified as able-bodied seaman by swearing, without repeating herself, two minutes running. At 14 she could curse for four minutes. Her father shipped her on, with a large supply of patent milk powders which nourished the young sea-woman not at all. No native wet nurse could be persuaded to stay aboard, and Joan was slowly starving when "Stitches," the sailmaker, managed to barter a handful of dried apricots and an old alarm clock for a Norfolk Island milch-goat. A year later the good creature was killed by wreckage in a squall, and Joan went on regular sailor's diet: duff pudding once a week, onion bouillon (one onion to a bucket of water), curry and rice, boiled tapioca with pale lavender cornstarch sauce--the Jap colored the food to make it seem tastier than it was. Aged two, Joan could stagger across the deck and yell "goddamned wind" (picked up from the mate). She thereupon graduated from baby clothes to overalls carved from Stitches' outworn dungarees. Her first nightgown was a flour sack which after many washings still proclaimed her ''Pure as drifted snow." One of her daily chores was to haul up water in a canvas bucket and swab down the poop-deck. As she hauled, one morning, a delicate blue sea-horse drifted by, his head emerging perky from an island of seaweed. Joan tried desperately to scoop him up, ran to the taffrail and scooped again, but the supercilious creature escaped. Over the side plunged six-year-old Joan in its wake, swam faster and faster from the schooner, while her father bellowed orders, and the mate lowered the dinghy. The oarsmen finally caught her, but not before she had captured the anemone and thrust it in her overalls pocket. Back on board, she was more distressed by her dead sea-horse than by the rope-end tanning administered by the captain. Mathematics she learned "helping" her father work out his navigation problems. Reading she learned from an intermittent encyclopedia and the Bible. Not the least of her laboratory experiments was, under Stitches' supervision, the dissection of a shark that chanced to be with young-- twelve diminutive sharks, 18 inches long. Shortly afterward the schooner touched at a tiny island south of Suva, where Joan, awestruck, watched a native woman bear her child to the tune of torn toms and delirious celebration. Years later, when a landlubber called Joan a water rat the old sailor rushed to her defense: "She's a girl flower, she is, with the tropic heavens fer a hothouse, and the scoldin' of the storm fer her when she's bad. An' she knows all that we sailormen know--all the good--'cause no one of us ever let her hear nothin' else." The Significance. Richer tales have been written of South Sea wonders, more winning records have been made of childhood and adolescence; but Cradle of the Deep combines both in startling naive fashion. An occasional incident smacks of fish-tale--the skipper dissipates a water spout by a few shots from a rifle--but the artless progression of the narrative carries conviction and interest. Sea Writers William McFee and Felix Riesenberg have raised manly cheers for the book. The Book of the Month Club offered it to 80,000 subscribers. The Author. Tall, black-haired, firm-muscled, vibrantly handsome offspring of a Turko-Montenegrin sailing master called Lazzarrevich, and Emmaline Trask Lowell, twice removed cousin of James Russell ("Speak Only to Cabots") Lowell, Joan Lowell was born in Berkeley, Calif., an eleventh child. "This is the last one," said Lazzarrevich, "and I'm going to save it. I'll take it away from the land and let the sea make it the pick of the puppies." Back on the Pacific Coast again, after 17 years at sea, Joan waited on Rotary luncheon tables, tended babies, washed automobiles, sat at table with Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush while he punched his fork through two rolls and imitated his own feet. She played a sea captain's daughter in Port o' London with Basil Rathbone, took a shot at Midwestern stock acting, married a grizzled, urbane journalist-playwright named Thompson Buchanan. She wrote her book by herself and says she "knew it was good," but feared that Husband Buchanan "might think it was lousy."