Vidal, Gore Williwaw

A sea story set in the Aleutian Islands during the latter days of World War 2, Williwaw was Vidal’s first published novel. Much of the story is set aboard a small U.S. Army steamship carrying passengers and freight from one isolated Aleutian island port to another. While en route to an island serving as Army headquarters the ship, manned by a combination of former civilian merchant mariners and draftees, encounters a fierce “williwaw,” which one character likens to “a kind of a hurricane with a lot of snow.” The storm, with winds of up to 100 miles per hour, nearly sinks the ship. The vessel is ultimately saved by the superior seamanship of her captain, a pre-War 2nd Mate in the Merchant Marine. Vidal convincingly traces the crews interactions before, during and after the chaos of the storm, and includes vivid descriptions a bitter rivalry between one of the mates and the vessel’s unpopular Chief Engineer. This rivalry, begun in a dispute over the affections of a girl in one of the ports they frequently visit, leads, in the novel’s climax, to the Chief’s death after he falls overboard into the Bering Sea. The mate’s failure to report the incident is chilling, as is his captain’s impersonal acceptance of the Chief Engineer’s fate. The novel was later (1953) issued as a mass market paperback under the title Dangerous Voyage.