Seafaring Yarn That Doesn’t Reach Full Sail

Actor Gene Hackman’s neighbor in Santa Fe for the last decade has been Daniel Lenihan, a National Park Service expert on underwater archeology, shipwrecks and diving. The two have written a seafaring yarn and coming-of-age story set in 1805, using Lenihan’s knowledge and, presumably, the feel for dramatic structure Hackman picked up while making movies such as “The French Connection” and “The Unforgiven.”

It could be a lot worse. “Wake of the Perdido Star” won’t make readers forget Melville or Conrad, Patrick O’Brian or C.S. Forester, but it succeeds as a boys’ adventure story and now and then rises above that level.

The hero is 17-year-old Jack O’Reilly, son of an idealistic but impractical Pennsylvania gunsmith whose outspoken insistence that America live up to the promises of the Founding Fathers makes him plenty of enemies among those who distrust his Catholicism and his Cuban wife’s exotic looks.

Finally, the family emigrates from Salem, Mass., on the Perdido Star, a merchant ship bound for Havana, hoping to claim Jack’s mother’s inheritance: fields of sugar cane held in trust by a neighbor, Count de Silva. The count, however, proves to be a villain. To keep the land, he has the O’Reillys ambushed. Only Jack survives, badly wounded. He burns for revenge but has no choice but to rejoin the departing ship as an apprentice seaman.

During the Perdido Star’s voyage to the South Seas, Jack’s anger and despair slowly give way to confidence in his abilities and regard for his shipmates. The captain is going insane; the crew includes a couple of bullies. But Jack’s wish to live in bitter isolation is overcome by the friendship of the first mate, Quince; a Chinese cook, Quen-Li, who is much more than he seems; and Paul Le Maire, a young castaway with a frail body and a formidable education.

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The Perdido Star weathers the gales of Cape Horn, trades in Tahiti, then is wrecked in a typhoon. The captain is lost. The survivors, washed onto an atoll, face a daunting list of tasks: to feed themselves; decide who’s in charge; deal with natives (friendly and unfriendly); and improvise high technology, including diving bells carpentered from casks, in order to salvage Jack’s father’s Kentucky rifle barrels and firing mechanisms from 60 feet of water.

Despite his youth, Jack emerges as a leader. There’s nothing he can’t do, including amputating Quince’s arm without anesthetic. He helps defend the friendly tribe, the Belaurans, from their enemies and later from Dutch slave traders. The “Brotherhood of the Star,” reluctant pirates, defeat the Dutch, capture their ship and, in a yearlong effort, splice parts of it and the Perdido Star together into a vessel they can sail to Manila. The legend of “Black Jack O’Reilly” has preceded them.

Jack wonders at people’s eagerness to fear him, just as he wonders why leaders are so rare, when “he expected more from ‘grown men.’ Most of them only wanted to follow.” It’s at moments like these that the novel briefly becomes more than a mix of sea lore and contrivances so neatly arranged that the Star’s crew avoids the stigma of piracy, a War of 1812 sequel is hinted at, and Jack (despite months in a tropical paradise) saves his virginity for the girl he left behind in Salem.

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If only the writing were as good as the research. Instead, the ordinariness of the prose leaches color from the settings, excitement from the derring-do. Hackman and Lenihan’s concessions to 19th-century style are inconsistent. (Did events “escalate” and people “overreact” in 1805? Could a scene be “surreal” before Surrealism?) Rough sailors’ attitudes toward aborigines, slavery and the opium trade are remarkably enlightened, and the choice Jack must make when he sails back to Cuba--should he risk his second “family,” his shipmates, to avenge the first?--is loaded from the start.