White Sails Crowding

THE VOYAGE OF THE CAP PILAR (360 pp.) --Adrian Seligman--Dutton ($4.75).

She was a barkentine of 295 tons, named for a headland in Tasmania, and she was rotting at a stone quay in St. Malo when Adrian Seligman found her. Six years out of Cambridge and holder of a second mate's certificate earned in three years at sea, Seligman had a new wife, a legacy of -L-3,500 and the uncertain future that everyone had in 1936. He bought the Cap Pilar, refitted her and sailed her around the world.

The story of her harum-scarum voyage, well and engagingly told, was first published in England in 1939, but smothered by the war along with other travel books by leisurely private adventurers. If armchair circumnavigators are now willing to knock about under sail without even wireless aboard, much less radar, the Cap Pilar is their craft.

Forgotten Faces. Her crew were not seamen but romantics who invested -L-100 apiece in the venture. Of the ten men in her forecastle when she left Plymouth and plunged into a night of gale, only one had ever been to sea before. Soon almost all were seasick. Skipper Seligman felt a gloomy awe at his own temerity. He and the first mate, Lars, had to shout in melodramatic alarm to rouse hands to shorten sail. After the two-day gale had blown out, "faces that we had almost forgotten appeared blinking at the sun."

At Funchal in the Madeiras, where they put in to shift ballast, Skipper Seligman took on one of the trophies of the voyage. The horde of bumboat-men around the ship included one rascally old cicerone who presented a letter purporting to be from the captain of another ship:

"Dear Old Man,

Welcome once more agreeably. I must tell you in due course of my loveable colleague Juan Gomez, who will devotedly conclude with you unspeakable preferences in the matter of: soap, matches, silk pyjamas (for any gentleman's Mrs.), jewelry, oranges, cigarettes, brilliantine (most desirous), also all manner of especials. Great news if you are always in virile way of living since we made merry commonly in the pasture.

Your humbly adoring accomplice, Sir Jerome Lascelles (High Gentleman)"

Even when practice had made good seamen of all the amateurs aboard the Cap Pilar, the vagaries of winds, currents and outdated charts continued to give Skipper Seligman moments of agonizing suspense. The Cap Pilar's adventures--standing off the great surf of lonely Tristan da Cunha, fleeing before the howling westerlies from the Cape of Good Hope across nearly 6,000 miles of ocean to Tasmania, delicately threading between the coral reefs of the South Seas--are fascinating reminders of the age of seamanship.

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