Merrick, Elliott Passing By.

An engrossing merchant marine novel set late in the War and focusing on life at sea aboard (first) a T2 oil tanker and (later) a Liberty Ship already decrepit and seemingly about to fall apart at her welded seams. Merrick’s protagonist is a young American A.B. named Duncan (no surname) who had early in the War chosen to go to sea rather than enlist in the Army. We first meet Duncan in 1944 as he’s about to sign up aboard the tanker CORNHILL, and then follow the vessel’s uneventful trek across the North Atlantic in a 30-ship convoy. Merrick’s descriptions of convoy service are both poetic and precise enough to suggest that the author himself had seen North Atlantic mercantile duty. His descriptions of seafaring union activities are also of interest, as is his portrayal of the CORNHILL’s obviously gay ship’s cook. A particularly interesting passage describes the reading habits of the CORNHILL’s mariners down to the books that were read (and not read: sorry, Virginia Woolf!). Subsequent chapters follow Duncan and the CORNHILL into Caribbean Sea tanker duty.

The novel’s concluding sections find Merrick’s A.B. serving aboard the Liberty Ship SAUK CITY, primarily in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Arabia. Very late in the War the SAUK CITY is dispatched to South America and, in mid-ocean, torpedoed. Duncan and a handful of his crewmates survive the vessel’s sinking and then spend 40 days at sea slowly making their way 2100 miles west to Brazil in a small lifeboat. Merrick’s description of this ordeal is well drawn, and the novel concludes with the emaciated Duncan and his mates rescued by a British vessel within sight of the Brazilian coast.