WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA
John McCrystal
Bateman Books
REVIEWED BY JIM SULLIVAN
These 23 shipwreck tales were written for radio and there is a liveliness in writing for the ear. New Zealand’s big ones, from the Birkenhead of 1852 to the Wahine in 1968, are joined by many others and our vulnerability as an island nation is confirmed.
The shipwrecks from further afield include some harrowing disasters. The United States Navy ship Indianapolis went down in shark-invested waters in 1945 and the immigrant ship Cospatrick caught fire off South Africa in 1874. The loss of life in both cases was staggering.
There’s room for the unexplained, like the mystery wreck found on the West Coast in 1846 by Charles Heaphy and solving the puzzle of the fate of the Rifleman which disappeared in 1833.
In these and other stories, many of which already have earned whole books describing the ships’ fates, John McCrystal has shown great skill in condensing the material but including enough detail to maintain the emotional impact of the tragic events.
Even the Titanic story works in just a few pages.
Each tale is told briskly and energetically and, while the book is unlikely to find its way into cruise-ship libraries, for landlubbers it’s a fine collection of well-told mini-dramas.
