Townend, William Sabina's Brother
One of Townend’s most accomplished and compelling works, this novel presents a well-nuanced portrait of a merchant ship’s crew during wartime trans-Atlantic convoy service. Set in 1941 just prior to America’s entry into the war, the book focuses on the fictitious freighter ORANGE RIVER:
“The ORANGE RIVER was a wartime ship, built by a firm on Tyneside and resembling, down to the last bolt and rivet and strake, other ships built on the Clyde and Mersey and tees and in Philadelphia and Baltimore and San Francisco and Vancouver. Her speed was poor, her construction was sound, and her accommodation excellent, even the deck-hands and firemen having mess-rooms of their own and bathrooms. Their quarters were light and airy and comfortable and they were, in this ship and her sister ships, regarded by the designers as men who deserved something better to live in than the dark and dirty slums of fo’c’sles that had been so long considered good enough for sailors by British shipowners.” (pp. 72-73)
Much of the novel takes place during the ORANGE RIVER’s ill-fated last voyage (after losing her convoy a torpedo sends her to the bottom of the North Atlantic with great loss of life), and turns to her surviving crew members as they endure a harrowing 34 days at sea in an open boat. Of particular interest is a young American pacifist (the brother alluded to in Townend’s title), whose Christian beliefs — worn on his shirt sleeve, so to speak — help bring a handful of the ship’s crew safely back to England. In all, a riveting, harrowing and authoritative tale of survival at sea, made all the more compelling by the contemporary wartime flavor of Townend’s prose.