ROCKWELL KENT – N by E. Brewer & Warren, hardcover, 1930. Blue Ribbon Books, hardcover, 1933. Wesleyan University Press, hardcover, 1996.

   True adventure story told in the form of journal entries from January through September 1929. Each entry is illustrated by original woodcut prints by the author.

   The adventure begins when he agrees to join the three-man crew aboard a wooden sailboat, set to sail from New York Harbor to Greenland by way of Newfoundland and Labrador.

   They make it nearly to the shores of Greenland when:

   â€œWe lay, caught in the angle of a giant step of rock, keel on the tread and starboard side against the riser; held there by wind and sea; held there to lift and pound; to lift so buoyantly on every wave; to drop—crashing our thirteen iron-shod tons on granite. Lift and pound!….A giant sledge hammer striking a granite mountain; a hollow hammer; and within it a man. Picture yourself that man. I stayed below, and was…..set full blown into that pandemonium of force, his world — of wind, storm, snow, rain, hail, lightning and thunder, earthquake and flood, hunger and cold, and the huge terrifying presence of the unknown…..We live less by imagination than despite it.”

   The author, of course, lives to write this tale. The ship is not so lucky. Yet so beautiful to gaze upon “the mountains, at the smoking waterfall, at the dark green lake with wind puffs silvering its plain, at the flowers that fringe the pebbly shore and star the banks” that the sunken sailors can only proclaim that: “It’s right…that we should pay for beautiful things. And being here in this spot, now, is worth traveling a thousand miles for, and all that that has cost us. Maybe we have lived only to be here now.”

   He comes to see the lost ship as a gift: “Only those men who have through shipwreck, drunkenness or chance achieved such a loss have tested freedom; and in a world inclined to tame the wilderness and eliminate the hazards from experience we may well cling to the ancient, high born, salutary privilege of man — of getting, sometimes, drunk.”

   The sublimity on the terrain shakes his very being. “Not until darkness is at hand do I prepare my supper, for even these long days are far too short for all their beauty. Suddenly  — it is now dark — a prolonged, high-pitched barking breaks the stillness; turning my eyes to the sound I see, silhouetted against the sky on the dark ridge of the hillside, a little blue fox. He sticks his sharp nose up at Heaven and for an hour howls away.”

   Fusing with a land where nature still dominates over ‘civilization’, he learns that “Man is less entity than consequence and his being is but a derivation of a less subjective world, a synthesis of what he calls the elements…and thus the elements at work become for man the pattern of his conduct… sunshine and storm, peace and turmoil, lightning and thunder and the quiet interludes…. But in the wilderness invariably peace predominates; and seeing the quiet uneventfulness of lives lived there, their ordered lawlessness, the loveliness and grace of bearing and of look and smile that it so often breeds and fosters we may indeed lament what man has made of man and hold those circumstances of congestion which are called civilization to be less friendly to beauty than opposed to it.”

   It is a strange adventure novel that keeps on going once the adventure ends. And here, the adventure and the propulsion of that narrative thrust drowns with the ship. Yet once the ship sinks, a new experience arises: that of a man forced back to nature. And rather than fighting it, accepting it. Rather than molding the land, letting the land mold him. Like Thoreau were his pond the Atlantic. Were Concord Greenland.

   The prose was difficult for me. It is frequently languorous and liquid, where I prefer the hard rocks that dash experience into shatters, that break everything upon its shores, into arrowheaded shards.

   Yet the name of the ship here was “Direction” — a name of which the author lamented its hubris. And as Direction sinks, the author’s spirits rise in the directionless peace of a pilgrim in reverse, from new world to old primordial lands of Icelandic saga, Native naivete, yearning less for rescue than escape.

   Some of the amazing woodcut images which compliment the narrative and provide more and better adjectives than those found in any thesaurus, can be found here and here