The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes
A massive ship’s shattered hull protrudes from the stinging spray of a ferocious gale. Only one man, who is partly insane, is still on board, working without rest or food to save her from sinking.
However, this individual is not a hero, and saving this ship was not the intention. The enigmatic truth behind Mary Deare’s final journey is revealed as Hammond Innes’ famous story transitions from frantic struggles at sea to a hair-raising legal dispute.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes
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Innes is a talented author of adventures. Innes produced a large body of work on the ocean. The good thing about this one is how he drags a regular person into a conspiracy to see how they react and deal with it. While Buchan also accomplished a lot of stuff, Innes was the master at it. He also transforms the commonplace into something terrifying. The Channel is typically pictured as a calm, uninteresting stretch of water between Dover and Calais, where your ferry could occasionally waver a little. However, it gets very choppy when it approaches Brittany, and sailors describe it as a particularly unpleasant sea. So this dude is out there on a small boat when he sees an abandoned ship.
Only the captain is left after a severe storm, and he has gone utterly insane. He was, I believe, the first thriller author to take something mundane and turn it into something horrific. This sea, which we usually consider to be so boring, is suddenly incredibly scary. By the 1950s, it had become popular due to Hitchcock’s work in the movies.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare, maybe the best literary work by the late Hammond Innes, entices readers with a title that alludes to the mysticism of the sea. This, however, is much more than just a maritime story; it’s a literary masterpiece that features deceit and enigmatic crimes, a ton of human drama, as well as action-packed scenes at sea, on land, and inside a perilous group of reefs known as The Minkies. This critique pertains to Alfred Knopf first printing in 1956.
The narrative starts on a gloomy evening in the English Channel, near the French shore. The Sea Witch is a sloop that will be utilized for maritime salvage work, and it is being piloted by the story’s protagonist, John Sands. Before the three-man crew is fully presented to the reader, a strange freighter appears in the storm-tossed midnight mist and dangerously approaches the much smaller sailboat. Furthermore, not a single crew member could be seen on the freighter’s bridge during the terrifying seconds prior to the impending crash. One of the greatest maritime mystery-thrillers of the 20th century starts off like this. And it is typical Inness.
Hammond Innes was a novelist who gave his works two peculiar characteristics. First off, the author had extensive experience sailing in open waters and had a thorough understanding of ships, geography, and the ocean. You will quickly notice that every page contains traces of that personal understanding.
Additionally, Innes would often spend six months in the setting of his next book, meticulously researching the physical aspects of the locality as well as the language(s) and customs of the area. Therefore, you as the reader are never cut off from the story, whether the plot takes you to a waterfront pub, sailing through a new gale on the English Channel, boarding a freighter off the fog-obscured coast of France, or navigating through a strange area of reefs known as The Minkies.
