Of the Everlasting Sea

SEA FIGHTS AND SHIPWRECKS (315 pp.)--Hanson W. Baldwin--Hanover House ($3.95).

Napoleon was in exile, Louis XVIII was back on the throne, and a wealthy Frenchman improbably named Schmaltz was dispatched by the King to take over the African colony of Senegal. Governor Schmaltz left Rochefort harbor on June 17, 1816, aboard the 44-gun frigate Medusa, accompanied by a motley crowd. "There were Napoleon's veterans--fresh from the wars, scarred, hardbitten, rough . . . There were huge colonials, their black shining faces marred with bluish tattoo marks . . . Ladies were attired and garnished . . . with elaborate coiffures and great flaring bonnets . . . while one or two filles de joie, painted, smiling, arch, were already looking about them."

With these non-punditic words, the New York Times's Military Pundit Hanson W. Baldwin takes leave of the stern and technical judgments he has been pronouncing for years. Instead, like the blue-water sailor he used to be in the '20s, he spins some old-fashioned yarns of ship-wrangling and man-trapping, mystery and mutiny on the high seas.

Like Rats. The voyage of Governor Schmaltz and the Medusa was one of seafaring history's most tragic snafus. Incompetent seamanship ran her aground on a well-charted shoal. The ship was not badly damaged, but "Governor Schmaltz refused to allow his barrels of flour to be jettisoned, [while] the captain, torn rudely from the arms of his mistress, would not permit some of the frigate's guns to be pitched overboard." As the situation grew worse, the governor, with his family, and the captain, with his mistress and his wines, left the ship safely, abandoning 400-odd passengers to their fate. Most of them crowded into four other boats or onto a crude raft where more than 100 perished. Of those left behind on the Medusa, only three were rescued 52 days later. "They had lived like rats on the rotting wreck . . . With knives and snarls and growls, they had greedily scavenged from hogshead and slop barrel and bilges . . . [They were found] half naked, bestial, but slobbering with joy at the sight of the rescuing vessel."

The Medusa's tragic wreck is one of 18 true tales of "the everlasting sea" excitingly told by Annapolisman Baldwin. In other stories, the "unsinkable" 46,000-ton Titanic rips her bottom open on an iceberg, the Admiral Graf Spee is scuttled off Uruguay (for lack of ammunition, it turns out, not from British-inflicted wounds). The most interesting of Baldwin's World War II stories are about that almost archaically swashbuckling sea-fighter ("he of the rakish air"), Admiral William F. Halsey. In grimly stirring excerpts from deck logs, Author Baldwin tells of the tremendous typhoon of 1944 that scattered and sank Halsey's Third Fleet ships as he tried to refuel at sea between battles. Baldwin's dramatic account of the Battle for Leyte Gulf includes both a castigation of "Bull's Run" after a Japanese decoy force, and 18 pages of footnotes by the Bull himself and Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. (Says Kinkaid: "Halsey [did] exactly what the Japs wanted him to do." Halsey's retort: "Bowing to pressure and turning South [to help Kinkaid] was the gravest error I committed during the battle.") Like Brothers. Among Baldwin's best stories: the famous mutiny on the U.S. brig Somers off the West Indies in 1842. Finding papers in Midshipman Philip Spencer's locker listing 31 names in Greek letters (four "certain," ten "doubtful, but will probably join," 17 "willy-nilly") the Somers' sundowner skipper hanged Spencer and two deckhands from the yardarm for "full and determined intention to commit a mutiny." Members of the Chi Psi fraternity, which Spencer had helped found at Union College, Schenectady, maintained that their brother had been martyred, that the Greek papers in his locker really held fraternity secrets. The fraternity song still proclaims that Spencer

When sinking down beneath the wave Loud shouted out: "Chi Psi!"

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