Book Review – Gene Hackman & Daniel Lenihan’s “Wake of the Perdido Star”
It’s time to raise anchor and set sail for a high seas adventure as Gene Hackman (yes, the actor Gene Hackman) and Daniel Lenihan take us on an around the world sailing trip in Wake of the Perdido Star.
Wake of the Perdido Star begins in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1805.
There, seventeen-year-old Jack O’Reilly lives with his parents, Ethan and Pilar O’Reilly. Times are tough for the O’Reilleys as his father, a talented gunsmith, had a frequent problem of speaking his mind and angering the wrong people. His actions have had their family on the move from town to town for the past few years.
Times are even tougher for the O’Reilleys as Ethan’s mouth got his family evicted from their current residence. With nowhere else to go, Ethan accepts his wife’s offer of traveling back to her homeland in Cuba and her family farm. Pilar had received a letter a few months ago claiming that her family’s farm was doing exceptionally well. So it’s off to Cuba for the family living in Connecticut.
The O’Reilly family packs their belongings and makes a lengthy trip to the seaside town of Salem, Massachusetts. The family ultimately finds and makes passage with the ship Perdido Star, which is scheduled to sail to Cuba with the tide the following evening.
While in town, Ethan tries to sell the family’s two horses, only to get taken and forced to accept an unfairly low offer right before the ship is scheduled to depart. While his father sulks about his stupidity on the ship, Jack O’Reilly sets it upon himself to extract some revenge. The seventeen-year-old races against time as he brutally attacks the two men who robbed his father, and then he freed his family’s horses, taking them to a farm outside of town. Jack raced back to the Perdido Star moments before it cast off on its southerly voyage.
Upon boarding the Star in Salem, first mate Quince essentially takes Jack under his wing, allowing him on the upper deck despite Captain Deploy’s attitude against it. Quince’s many years of sailing and tolerable attitude towards the youth make it a solid relationship. Although Jack isn’t an official part of the crew, he certainly feels like one throughout the voyage.
It’s in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, when Jack O’Reilly experiences his first bit of ship-to-ship combat. While the crew of the Star is repairing the ship one evening, Jack watches in eager as two ships pass each other in the harbor, one of them firing its cannons at the other. The ship being pursued catches fire and is ultimately sunk just offshore.
The Perdido Star finally departs a little while later, and not far from the shipwreck it picks up two survivors from the short naval battle. One of the men dies while the other, teenager Paul Le Maire, pulls through and survives. A smaller built person with a tongue as sharp as a cutlass, Paul is allowed to remain on the ship and quickly becomes friends with Jack.
The Perdido Star ultimately reaches Cuba and Habana harbor. Paul joins Jack and his parents as they seek out the powerful Count de Silva in regards to Pilar’s farmland. They join de Silva for an evening of festivities and then Paul returns to the Perdido Star. Captain Deploy allowed Paul to join the crew as an apprentice.
The next morning, Jack O’Reilly and his parents are brutally attacked by Count de Silva’s guards well outside of town. Jack is left for dead while his father is viciously killed. Jack comes to and tries to rescue his mother, but de Silva’s men beat him there. He’s forced to watch as his mother is killed. Jack then races back to the harbor and joins the crew of the Perdido Star.
Orphaned and thirsty for revenge, Jack O’Reilly vows his revenge as the Perdido Star sails south for Cape Horn and the South Seas. Now matter how long it takes, Jack carefully waits and plans his revenge for the brutal death of his parents.
But that’s just the first part of the book, Wake of the Perdido Star.
After making the perilous trip around the southern tip of South America, and then trekking through the South Seas, the Perdido Star comes upon a tremendous storm. The ship itself breaks apart as it hits a reef in a chain of islands. The crew is forced to abandon ship, and the survivors find themselves shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.
Almost one third of the book is dedicated to the shipwrecked crew. From initial survival to meeting natives living on other islands to fighting Dutch slavers to repairing their ship, the shipwrecked section of the book almost feels like one giant cliché. At times boring and at times very “convenient” for the survivors, it would have been nice if this section was substantially shorter in the book, perhaps even with a different outcome.
An interesting part of the shipwrecked segment was when Jack and Paul developed a diving bell for submerging and salvaging what they could from the sunken parts of the Perdido Star. It just seemed a little bit strange that the concept of the diving bell has been around since the 1500s, and yet none of the sailors had any experience with the concept, whether doing it themselves or hearing of salvage ships using them. The diving bell system that the survivors ultimately use had been around over a hundred years before the events in the story.
The final third of the book progresses quickly once the Perdido Star is effectively mated with the Dutch ship that the crew captured while marooned. They sail for Manilla in the Philippines, and after an extended stay where they catch up with current events and have a battle with rivals, the crew sails halfway around the world for Cuba. There in Cuba, fearsome pirate “Black Jack” O’Reilly is given a shot at the revenge that he’s been craving for years.
As a whole, Wake of the Perdido Star is a pretty good sailing and adventure book. It’s a far shot from being great, but the characters and scenarios keep the story moving and interesting most of the time.
But I do have a few issues with the story.
For starters, Jack O’Reilly is originally pitted as a strong teenager, but not one that bright. The classroom really isn’t his place at that age. Despite not being so bright, the lad is certainly brilliant enough to be a smart hand-to-hand fighter, developer of technology such as the diving bell, a fairly good negotiator, and an expert on naval tactics. Naturally, he’s chosen to be captain of the ship near the end of the book and his name is feared throughout the world’s oceans.
A bigger issue with the story is the passage of time, or lack of it in the story.
Unless it states that a certain event took so long to complete, there’s no real way of knowing the passage of time in the book. We have to remember that when sailing in those days, trips across oceans took weeks or even a month of two depending on circumstances. So how many months were the crew stuck on the islands? Eight months? A year? How about the rest of the sailing trips throughout the book?
As much as it may seem to be a cliché, perhaps Wake of the Perdido Star would have been better written as a diary of one (or more) of the characters, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Do these issues mean that this is a bad story?
Certainly not.
This is another classic tale of revenge mixed with a sailing adventure around the world. This was a fairly easy read with a pretty good cast of characters. As a first novel by Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan, this one was pretty good. It just needs some fine tuning here and there along with more attention to detail.
Speaking of attention to detail, some of the details and descriptions of the ship were so detailed that they should have included a diagram so the rest of us landlubbers have a clue to what the authors are talking about. The same for some of the dialogue and salty language.
It’s very apparent that a lot of research went into the book and that time period, which is great. Wake of the Perdido Star just needs some adjusting to go from being a good book into an outstanding tale of adventure, suspense and revenge.
