AILS AND Yacuting Tanxs, auk Cowper. Published by J.
Potter, Admiralty Agent, for Charts, 146, Minories. £2 net.
Mr. Cowper's—'Jack-alll-alone""—books are on the cabin bookshelves of all true yachtsmen—that is, of such men as sail their own boats, finding their way up and down the coasts of the Channel, North Sca, and Atlantic, and are not merely carted about, not knowing how, in yachts provided with professional captains and crews—in short, such men as proved of great use on the M. L.s, mine-sweepers, and trawlers throughout the Great War. Mr. Cowper has long passed his allotted three-score years and ten, and is still cruising about single-handed in a fairly large ketch. In this book he reviews over half a century of his sea wanderings, which provided the material for the compilation of his well-known series of alumes Sailing Tours,'' volumes pilot guides.
Crvistxe ror Firty Years.
But "Cruising Sails and Yachting Tales" is not a pilot book. It is not intended to be one. In _it the author lets himself go. He writes breezily of his various adventurous cruises,, chiefly on his twenty-nine ton yvawl "Lady Harvey," occasionally accompanied by friends, generally single-handed or with some rather useless smal! boy with him, but never taking paid man or pilot, along the coasts of Britain, from the Orkneys to Scilly, and along the western coasts of France as far south as the Loire. Io is a rambling, gossipy, cheery book, brimming with yarns. He writes picturesquely of the ancient histories of the wild coasts he visits—of the drowned city of Is and the legends of Brittany. He seems to have got on very well with the people he met, and pleasant are his pictures of the bright village life of France and the kindly fishing folk and peasants of Brittany.
He seems to have provided himself with but poor or small-scale charts and no sailing directions while coasting. But he always got to his objective safely by day or stormy night. This cannot be put down to luck only, for his experiences were too many. He must have the true sea instinct to guide him. At any rate, he has cruised in this happy-go-lucky way for fifty years without a mishap. But the insurance companies refuse to insure him.
There was an object for these apparently reckless methods, as this quotation from his new book shows: 'On the whole, I approve of the plan I had proposed te myself when I started to gather the materials for 'Sailing Tours,' of knowing nothing of the places was about to see for the first time. so as to have a clean slate and perfectly original impressions. After these had been digested, then I could see what others thought.
The book contains forty illus. trations from the author's own sketches.—The "Morning Post."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.