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Full Circle
Stowaway
by Karen Hesse, with illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.
Margaret K. McElderry Books (an imprint of Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing Division), 2000. 318 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Consider: In the year 1768, Nick, an eleven-year-old London boy, chooses to escape a broken family, an indifferent father, a cruel teacher, and an apprenticeship he despises by sneaking aboard a sailing ship bound for faraway places. Perhaps you think you have heard this story before. But while the sea voyage as a metaphor for life is a tried and true one, it is not a tired one, particularly in the masterful hands of Karen Hesse. Winner of the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust, a novel-in-verse set in the Depression, Hesse has proven her worth as a writer of historical fiction for young people. With Stowaway she strengthens her hold on the genre.
Nicholas Young is the London boy in question, and the Endeavour is the ship he boards. Captained by James Cook, the Endeavour is about to embark on what will become a three-year voyage that circumnavigates the globe. For Nicholas it is an escape from hardship to hardship and danger, but he seems gladly to accept the risks of the latter over the certainties of the former.
Hesse has based her story on actual accounts of the Endeavour’s voyage. (She includes an afterword that provides factual followup to the story, a list of the ship’s company, a detailed chronology of the voyage, and a glossary of nautical and historical terms that will greatly assist readers.) There was indeed an eleven-year-old boy named Nicholas Young on the ship. The young naturalist Joseph Banks was also on board. That he and Nicholas developed a connection is almost a certainty -- the historical Nicholas later sailed with Banks on another voyage. That Nicholas was a stowaway is Hesse’s educated guess.
We learn that Nicholas’s family has gone awry following the death of his mother. Nick is sent away to a school run by a Reverend Smythe, who, judging by Nick’s level of education, was an effective teacher despite being hated by his student. Nicholas subsequently steals money from his next master, a butcher, and buys his way onto the Endeavour, where, to avoid being put off at the next available landfall, he remains hidden until the ship is well under way.
Nicholas tells his story in the form of a journal. His entries range in length from a single sentence to several pages, but each is on the average just a few paragraphs long. The reader can easily imagine that Nick lacks the luxury of time and space in which to write long, narrative passages about his experiences, but in many cases few words imply volumes of subtext: “It’s an odd colour, this sea. I don’t like it.” Unafraid of hard work, Nick achieves a level of solid acceptance among his crewmates. He gives Samuel Evans reading lessons on Sundays and is a true friend to Tarheto, a Tahitian boy who is brought on board in the midst of the journey. But there is constant tension between Nick and midshipman Bootie, who takes many opportunities to place Nick at risk and gives him “looks blacker than tar.”
As Nick matures, in mind, heart, and spirit, throughout the course of three years on the Endeavour, his growth has an impact on the men with whom he is in constant contact. Given the author’s choice to have Nick tell the story in journal form, his growth and its impact are understated and unsentimental. Nick writes of his days -- helping take care of the sick during an epidemic of a waterborne disease, for instance, and ably assisting the cook, who “often showed me kindness for no other reason than that he liked the way I plucked a goose” -- in a matter-of-fact manner. Nick’s eventual coming-to-terms with Bootie, at the latter’s deathbed, could have easily been overwritten and overwrought. As it is, Hesse allows the two to reach a measure of reconciliation that is not without ambiguity; it is a moment that one can imagine Nick mulling over for years to come.
This journal style is not without its shortcomings, though. Stowaway is not a swashbuckling sea adventure; rather, it is a tale of perseverance, hard work. long hours, and high risk. But with the exception of Nick’s sustained account of the Endeavour becoming hung up on a coral reef for several days, reliance on short journal entries sometimes seems to diminish the potential dramatic effect of Nick’s tale. But by the same token, when relentless disease strikes the Endeavour and day after day is marked by yet more illness and death, Nick’s brief entries take a toll on the reader that is much akin to that surely experienced by Nick and his mates.
As the Endeavour nears the end of its history-making circle, Nick realizes that he must make amends for his past mistakes before moving on with his life. He yearns to return to England with as much fervor as he once desired to leave it. In Stowaway, as in Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse has created a narrator for whom circumstances and hardship provide the foundation for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturity. Nicholas Young will spend a lifetime processing (to use a nineties term) his experiences aboard the Endeavour. His tale will encourage young readers to face their own challenges with equanimity and to choose responsibility and camaraderie over individualism and selfishness.
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