On Soundings

By Peter Stanford

THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS by ERSKINE CHILDERS 284 pages. Dover. $3.50.

Many a small-boat sailor prides himself on knowing what a No. 3 Rip-pingille stove is from the reading of this novel. A band of literary aficionados accounts some of Childers' prose as the finest ever written in English on the experience of sailing. First published in 1903, The Riddle of the Sands caused a sensation by speaking of a plausible German invasion of England. It has been reprinted enough to become a minor classic. Generations of readers have leaned back joyfully into the author's affectionate knowledge of the sea as they follow the adventures of two young Englishmen who cruise the low-lying islands and tidal sands of the North Sea in a small boat and unravel a plot that involves spying and skullduggery.

"I waited on deck," reports Carruthers, the narrator, a clever, foppish young Foreign Office sprig who has just joined Davies, a sea-struck Oxford classmate, on his cruising boat, "and watched the death-throes of the suffocating sands under the relentless onset of the sea ... The Dulcibella, hitherto contemptuously inert, began to wake and tremble under the buffetings she received ... Soon her warp tightened and her nose swung slowly round; only her stern bumped now, and that with decreasing force. Suddenly she was free and drifting broadside to the wind till the anchor checked her and she brought up to leeward of it, rocking easily and triumphantly." Riddle's most famous nautical scene involves a desperate 13-mile trip in a dinghy through solid fog and tricky waters, with Carruthers rowing like a metronome on command and Davies guiding the boat with a stop watch, a chart and an uncanny knowledge of tides, shoals and currents.

Barges by Night. Childers' book is full of suspense, as well as love and art and old-fashioned patriotism. From the tale's opening in Edwardian London to the young adventurers' discovery of a Teutonic scheme for dragging troops in barges to England by night, Riddle's scenes carry remarkable conviction. One reason is Childers' extraordinary affection for his main characters, both the worldly Carruthers and Davies, whom Carruthers has always patronized but comes to admire. There is, of course, a damsel in distress -- Clara, whose Englishness in the midst of Germans gives away the plot a bit early. But who cares? A man would have to be a brutish lout not to fall for Clara, with her "brown, firm hand -- no, not so very small, my sentimental reader."

The useful introduction to this new edition provides an account of Childers' tragic later career in the Irish Rebel lion. An Anglo-Irishman educated in England, Childers was a driven and complex idealist whose life ended in front of a firing squad near Dublin in 1922. Along with his Bostonian wife Dorothy, Childers had run arms into Ire land by sailboat before World War I. After serving with distinction in the Royal Navy, he again took up the cause of Irish liberty. Childers, in fact, pressed so hard for total Irish independence after the Free State compromise that he became an embarrassment to the Irish patriots and was done away with by the I.R.A. itself. Yet he shook hands with each of his executioners and, before his death, made his 16-year-old son promise to seek out and shake the hand of each man who had signed his death warrant. The son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, eventually became President of the Free State.

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