GETTING IT RIGHT ABOUT THE SEA
THE RELUCTANT PATRIOT: A NOVEL OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
By Roger F. Duncan
205 pp.
Down East Books. $15.95.
Reviewed by Randy
Randall
When I was a boy,
I discovered Elijah Kellogg’s Elm Island series of books for young readers
and read them one after the other. Even though the stories had been written
in the late 1800s, the outdoor adventures and seafaring appealed to my young
imagination. Kellogg was for many years the minister in Harpswell and as a
young man had gone to sea in coasting vessels, making some voyages as far as
the Caribbean. Then he sailed his own boat, the Cadet, throughout
Casco Bay, making his ministerial rounds among his island parish. In her
Down East magazine article about Kellogg, Anne Molloy quoted one of his
adult readers and fellow sailors as saying “He always gets everything right
when he writes about the sea. I must say Uncle Kellogg gets it nearer from a
sailor’s point of view than any of the others.”
Now very nearly
the same thing might be said of Roger Duncan and his first historical novel
The Reluctant Patriot. As much as this is a book about seafaring and
sea battles at the time of the American Revolution, Roger Duncan has drawn
on his own forty-plus years of sailing the coast of Maine and New England to
make his story come alive, helping us understand how things might have been
when the Sons of Liberty attacked the HMS Margaretta in Machias bay
and won the first naval victory in the American War of Independence.
When, in the novel, the sloops and schooners sail between
Down East Maine and Boston, you may be sure the headings, landmarks, and
harbors that are mentioned are all correct because Duncan would have sailed
those same courses himself and visited those harbors many times. Over the
past years Roger Duncan has coedited and updated the fifth through the tenth
editions of A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast. The
Cruising Guide has been the undisputed bible for sailors and boaters
cruising the coast of New England and points Down East. With these years of
sailing experience as background, Duncan has taken us in his story back in
time to the days of a frontier Maine, then still part of Massachusetts, and
imagined what life must have been like for those pioneers who were wresting
their living from the Maine forests and the Atlantic Ocean. Duncan’s
historical research has given him many of the true names, places, and events
that were actual and current at that time. From there he has filled in
between the notes of historical fact with an inspiring story of what might
have really happened. As you read, you find yourself blurring the facts with
the fiction, and you begin to think this really could be what took place.
For his starting point, though, Duncan has chosen a
lesser known incident that happened in February 1775 weeks before the
outrageous attack on the Margaretta in June, and that was the wreck
of the British ship Halifax. The ship was being piloted by a Maine
seaman impressed to serve in the King’s navy and brought aboard the
Halifax for his extensive knowledge of the Maine coast and its dangers.
The ship foundered on Sheep Island Rock as it approached the entrance to
Machias Bay and was a total loss. Did the impressed sailor seize his chance
to strike a blow against the British and scuttle the ship on purpose or did
he get confused by the wind and the moon tide and unknowingly steer the ship
to its doom? The Reluctant Patriot helps us understand how this
unnamed Mainer might have had a hand in harassing the British and maybe,
just maybe, how he would have joined those loggers and fishermen of Machias
who so brazenly attacked the king’s warship Margaretta.
For
me this book was made all the more plausible by Duncan’s
wonderful descriptions of ship handling, spar making, and the commerce by
sail on the Maine frontier. It doesn’t take much to be absorbed by
Duncan’s story and, drawing on your
own high school American history lessons, to be transported back to those
heady days when the Sons of Liberty were raising liberty poles, and the
first shots were being fired at Concord and Lexington.
The defeat and capture of the Margaretta has
become fairly well known and highly publicized as the first naval engagement
of the American Revolution. A few years ago Richard Sewell wrote about this
incident in an award-winning play called The Ruckus at Machias. Today
Machias and the surrounding towns hold the Margaretta Festival for
three days in June to commemorate once again those foolhardy loggers and
farmers who took on the King’s navy and won.
The American Revolution seems to be one of those
historical events that captures the imagination of both authors and readers
and has spawned a long list of novels. The Reluctant Patriot can take
its rightful place in the genre alongside such other famous period stories
as Johnny Tremain by Ester Forbes and Arundel by Kenneth
Roberts. I think of these books and many others like them as stories for
younger readers because of the easily identifiable characters and the plots
that emphasize action and heroics in the face of great odds. Taken in this
light, Duncan’s new book is fun to read. It’s a great way for young people,
especially, to learn how wild and rural a place Maine was in that time after
the French and Indian wars and leading up to the Revolution. Sailors and
lovers of the sea will appreciate Duncan’s first-hand descriptions of ship
handling and sailing as well as what it’s like to sail blindly through a
thick fog or struggle to stay alive in a raging northeast gale. Duncan, just
like Kellogg “always gets everything right when he writes about the sea.”
