Customer Reviews

Bird of Dawning

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What a fantastic story of a 2nd Mate aboard a Clipper running a race from China to London when the ship goes down.

"Are you going to follow the sea, Chedglow?" Cruiser asked.
"No, sir; not after this."
"Don't be so sure," Cruiser said. "You'll be glad of this after it is over.
This is a real thing, and somehow few people get anything real into
their lives."
"What do you call real, sir?"
"Real?" Cruiser said. "When you've got nothing except just your bare
life and you're up against destiny or death. When you're up against
your Fortune whether it goes for or against you."

If you think you have the slightest bit of brine running through your veins then you need to read this book.

When in 1946 Heinemann's decided to be selective in its reprints of Masefield numerous novels, it billed The Bird of Dawning as 'his great novel'. This led me to read it with the wrong expectations, and it was years before I went on to his other novels. In fact, Masefield's novels are hugely varied and almost all worth reading (which one could not say of his terribly unequal volumes of verse). The Bird of Dawning gets going more swiftly, and maintains the pace more surely, than almost all the others. Its accounts of the hazards of the sea and sailoring are stunningly vivid. The one possible disappointment for the reader is that the sinister atmosphere of the opening is not maintained, and what starts like a great novel finishes up as a splendid entertainment. But splendid it is, and this most attractive and portable reprint deserves every success. (If you prefer to hunt out a secondhand copy, the original printing by Macmillan's can be recommended for its handsome type, though it is not so neat a volume as this reprint.)