The Tattooed Man

In 2016, I wrote of my rediscovery of Howard Pease, the author of many boys' adventure books I read when I was about 12 and 13.  I had forgotten both the names of the books and the name of the author, until a friend happened to mention Pease's name in a way that caused the pieces to fall into place.

And so I wrote my review of Thunderbolt House in September 2016.  But Thunderbolt House, a story of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, was not a typical Pease adventure.  Pease is famous as a writer of sea adventures, especially the "Tod Moran series."   Pease was born in 1894 in Stockton, California, and graduated from college at Stanford.  He interrupted his education to serve in World War I, and spent two of his summers while at the university working in the engine room of cargo ships.

He published 22 novels during his career, most of them about life at sea.  He often criticized the "soft" stories that children's literature offered boys.  His books emphasized the value of hard physical labor, courage, and a sense of adventure -- in addition to intelligence and sensitivity.  As well as writing books, Pease was also a high school English teacher, and became principal of Los Altos high school, just south of Palo Alto.

All of his works have been out of print for some time.  His first published work -- and introduction to the Tod Moran stories -- was The Tattooed Man (pub. 1926), a copy of which I purchased this week.  The book went through a number of printings, but I purchased a paperback edition printed in 1948.  The 1961 paperback reprinting of Thunderbolt House, which I purchased second hand, showed a cover price of 35 cents.  My copy of The Tattooed Man, printed 14 years earlier in a similar format, probably sold for 20 or 25 cents.  I bought it used, with yellowing, somewhat fragile pages, but otherwise in reasonably good shape, for only $35 through Amazon. 

Needless to say, Pease's books aren't available on Kindle.

The Tattooed Man introduces us to 17-year-old Tod Moran as he walks out of San Francisco's Ferry Building, onto the Embarcadero, looking for Pier 43.  His older brother, Neil, had served for a couple of years as a purser on a cargo ship, sending post cards and letters home from romantic locations to a starry-eyed younger brother.  Then, the cards and letters suddenly stopped coming.  Tod plans to visit the shipping company at Pier 43, and find out what happened.

Something mysterious is afoot, and he ends up signing on as mess boy on the company's almost-derelict cargo ship, the Araby, bound for Marseilles via the Panama Canal.   By the end of the first day at sea, all of Tod's romantic images of life at sea, derived from excessive reading of boys' literature, have been dashed.  The life of a crewman, as opposed to an officer, is a life hard and brutish.

But also instructive, both to Tod and to us as readers.  Although the plot is a bit melodramatic, with skullduggery and insurance fraud afoot, the descriptions of how a ship worked -- at least in the 1920s -- and how it was manned are informative and fascinating.  And not just for "young adults."  Without trying to outline the plot, we follow Tod and the Araby through a California coastal storm and Tod's first seasickness, through the Canal, across the Atlantic, and into port in Marseilles.  Tod's adventures then continue ashore, mostly afoot, from Marseilles to Antibes, near Cannes. 

Tod is a resourceful young man, who -- despite being considered a rich "toff" -- learns to survive, living and working shoulder to shoulder with overworked, bitter, and definitely non-genteel crewmen.  He is lured into a boxing  match with a vicious, tough, and muscular engine room worker, and wins because of his high school boxing lessons and sharper wit.  Although everyone, including Tod, throws around language that we consider offensive today -- "Chink," "wop," "nigger" are examples -- and although we are assured that all the men and officers swear obscenely and grotesquely, the oaths we hear are such as "Sufferin' catfish," and "drat," and "golly." 

Needless to say, Tod does find his brother, and the forces of evil are averted.  He arrives back in San Francisco, glad to be on dry land once more.  Would he ever sail again?  He isn't certain. The book concludes:

The Araby's upper decks lay deserted.  Her funnel and foremast towered black against the blazing sky.  Gulls swooped and wheeled about them, settled upon the bridge rails, upon the lifeboats, peering with curious eyes down at the galley.  A departing cargo liner went by toward the headlands, and the gulls, with raucous cries, rose in circles and winged their way to sea.

What do you think?  Even forgetting that this was only the first book of the Tod Moran series! 

Pease based The Tattooed Man on two of his own voyages as a crew member, and on a walking trip he took as a student from Marseilles into Italy.

These were books that strongly attracted young teenage boys in the 1950s.  The fact that they have gone out of print suggests that kids now find them too dated to be interesting.  Most young adult literature is now written by women for, primarily, girls.  Those books that are intended more for boys tend to show boys how to understand their feelings and how to handle their social relationships with others.  Without disparaging that kind of story, I'd like to believe that books that encourage adventure and physical courage can still find a teenage audience -- and, in today's world, with girls as well as with boys.