Sharecroppers of the Sea

GULF STREAM NORTH (253 pp.)-Earl Conrad--Doubleday ($3.50).

Writers of the sea, like war novelists, test their heroes by putting them through an ordeal. In his semi-documentary novel. Gulf Stream North, Author Earl Conrad pits a simple crew of Florida Negroes against schools of unpalatable fish called menhaden, and gives their humble ordeal moments of tragic dignity.

To the crew of the Moona Waa Togue, menhaden is known as pogy, and catching pogy (for oils and fertilizer) is the hard work they do from April to November. The fishing day begins at 4 in the morning, when the mate, who tells the story, bangs on the weather-beaten shacks of a Florida port town and rounds up the men; sometimes it ends before dusk, sometimes later. Where the ship hunts for pogy is strictly the business of Captain Crother. a white man who rarely cracks a smile because the Moona Waa Togue is his last stop on a downhill career. How much pogy is caught is everybody's business, for the men sharecrop the catch, getting a dime apiece for every 1,000.

In the five blazing hot days that Gulf Stream North covers, it looks as if no one is going to make a dime. The men mumble against the captain and against the Moona Waa Togue, a leaky, loo-ft. sieve that has been on the seas for decades.

When a boil of Gulf Stream finally points to pogy, and the men in the small boats close their quarter-mile ring of net to draw it in, the menhaden suddenly "thunder" (i.e., make a quivering mass surge) and split the net. Captain Crother follows another school too close to shore, promptly loses a second net when its base is sucked fast into the sandy ocean floor. Still another catch has to be let go when baby sharks begin to shred a third net. In final irony, the Moona Waa Togue is almost within hail of home port with her decks piled high with pogy when a storm drives her down the coast, washes a man overboard to his death, and chops the ship up like kindling wood.

More a novel by courtesy than by craft, Gulf Stream North makes what its characters do seem a good deal more real than what they are, makes the special idiom they talk most real of all. Author Conrad regards Gulf Stream North as the completion of an "idiom trilogy" that began with Scottsboro Boy and continued with Rock Bottom. When the men of the Moona Waa Togue "crap up the captain" (praise him), sing their work chanteys ("Who emptied out the bottles from hea-a-ven-n-n, and let the rain fall down-w-w-n-n?"), or joke about the odor of their cargo ("Mellow, eh fellow . . . Real mellow, fellow"), their talk seems the bonus catch in Author Conrad's net.

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