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james fenimore cooper
MILES WALLINGFORD: Sequel to Afloat and Ashore Paperback: 418 pages Publisher: BiblioBazaar (November 8, 2006) ISBN-10: 1426448236 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com Would you recommend this book to other readers? * * * * * YES! review: Without missing a beat from the last page of the first novel, MILES WALLINGFORD, the follow-on novel to James Fenimore Cooper's AFLOAT AND ASHORE, begins "ashore," on the Hudson River downstream from Albany. Crusty Moses Marble soon happens upon an old lady who turns out to be the mother who had unwillingly abandoned him a half century earlier. Moses discovers his dead sister's daughter at the same time. Suddenly the man apparently once doomed to solitude has a family! By novel's end he has even been "bride's-maid" at Miles's wedding and later captain of newly wealthy Miles's ship, The Sludge, named for the savage Indian chief who had captured them both years earlier on the Oregon coast. Back at sea in 1803 his own vessel, Miles sails with cargo for neutral Hamburg. But France and England are at war and his ship is taken prize consecutively by both sides. He makes his daring escapes, but a remaining crew of two whites and two black slaves is not enough to secure his ship from peril of the deep. Returned to New York in 1804 after losing everything he owns, including his mortgaged farm, Miles is clapped into debtor's prison. There he is rescued by his still underage childhood sweetheart Lucy Hardinge with help from Andrew Drewett, who loves her. Learning from Drewett that, contrary to what was generally believed, Lucy had never accepted Andrew's proposals of marriage, Miles Wallingford takes heart and asks Lucy to marry him. She wonders what took him so long. Shortly after their nuptials, Lucy's father, Rev. Hardinge also unites in Christian wedlock the slaves Neb and Chloe Clawbonny. Miles immediately grants them their freedom. Yet, as Miles pens his memoirs 40 years later, neither Neb nor Chloe has shown the slightest interest in acting free, much less being free. "He has
had no intention to free me, whatever may have been my plans for
himself and his race" (Ch.30).
As for Miles's saintly sister Grace, she had wasted away and died in 1803, broken-hearted for being jilted by Lucy's brother Rupert Hardinge in favor of the smooth Englishwoman Emily Merton. The dying Grace commands her brother Miles Wallingford to give Rupert $20,000 from her estate, so that he can start a new life properly with his new love. This is perhaps the greatest passage on "love thine enemies" in English literature. The middle 2/3 of MILES WALLINGFORD is spent "Afloat" on the Atlantic. Our hero, along with old salt Moses Marble and Miles's ever faithful slave Neb endure illegal seizures of their neutral vessel on the high seas by both French and English. They effect escapes and survive, either together or separated, titanic gales and a final shipwreck. Once again in New York, his two friends suffer with Miles while he tries to recover his mortgaged farm and to pay his debts. As ruined as Biblical Job, Miles's faith in God, coupled with the help of rich heiress Lucy Hardinge, brings him through terrible downturns to final decades of happy marriage, children and grandchildren. That Lucy is still handsome and ever his loving wife "forms
not only the delight but the pride of my life. It is a blessing, for
which, I am not ashamed to say, I daily render thanks to God, on my
knees.
The End." -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/all/miles-wallingford-sequel-to-afloat -cooper-james-fenimore-~ctbk~b45a~57646715 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com name of review: "I feel I cannot love twice, not as I have, and still do love" rating: * * * * review: At the end of AFLOAT AND ASHORE, author James Fenimore Cooper left us readers worrying about the survival from near drowning in the Hudson River near Albany of two young suitors of still underage Lucy Hardinge. The two are novel's narrator Miles Wallingford and rich Manhattanite Andrew Drewett. The two men do survive and the follow-on novel MILES WALLINGFORD begins on the deck of Miles's sloop, The Wallingford. Events and overheard gossip conspire to make Miles believe that Andrew has proposed to Lucy and been accepted. Miles now realizes, however, that he himself loves Lucy passionately. Together the two raised virtually as siblings tend Miles's dying sister Grace and are humbled by her refusal to hate Lucy's brother Rupert Hardinge, whose breaking of their secret engagement has unhinged Grace's health. For her part Lucy for a time fears that Miles intends to marry the well-mannered Englishwoman whom he had rescued from death in London, Miss Emily Merton. Miles resolves to return to the sea to forget his hopeless love for Lucy. But he takes time to write her a farewell letter to give a faint inkling of what is going on in his heart: "I
feel I cannot love twice, not as I have, and still do love" (Ch.
11).
Later it occurs to him that his words were ambiguous. "... every syllable I had said would
apply just as well to Emily Merton as to Lucy Hardinge."
Accompanied by his old first mate and patron Moses Marble (who has recently discovered the mother who had abandoned him 50 years earlier) and slave Neb Clawbonny, Miles Wallingford sails with a load of his own cargo and in his own neutral ship for Hamburg. But the war between Napoleon and England causes his ship to be captured in turn by both sides. He escapes both the French and the English but his now seriously undermanned ship (two whites, two blacks) cannot survive a colossal storm off Ireland. The three return to America to find Miles a ruined man, his mortgaged farm Clawbonny sold for debts. Lucy persuades Andrew Drewett to go bail for Miles. When they meet in Manhattan's debtors prison, Andrew confesses to Miles that Lucy has consistently rejected all his proposals of marriage. This encourages Miles to tell Lucy that he cannot imagine life without her. He seeks her hand. Her response: "You
have them both, dear Miles, and can keep them as long as you please.
... Why have you so long delayed to tell me this, Miles. ... Silly
fellow! How could you suppose I would ever love any but you? ... I knew
you so well, Miles, that I am afraid I should have made the declaration
myself, had you not found your tongue"
(Ch. 27). In a concluding chapter penned 40 years later, Miles Wallingford carries us through his marriage to Lucy, their two sons and two daughters and their grandchildren. The novel's last sentence finds him thanking God daily for the marriage to his lifelong friend and wife. There are elements in the two novels, AFLOAT AND ASHORE and MILES WALLINGFORD that remind of the undeserved sufferings of Biblical Job, of Noah's terrible shipwreck and especially of Homer's Odysseus and his journey home through peril upon peril. The two novels are also pictures of the young USA from the 1790s into the 1840s, the increasingly politicized (pro-French, pro-British) American press, slavery in New York and the rest of the USA, of advances in naval architecture, gunnery and seamanship. We experience an old New York State in which thinking people still knew their place, took loving care of their slaves and strove to serve God within the non-fanatical framework of the Holy Catholic Episcopal faith. A great read. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/james_fenimore_cooper _miles_wallingford-1597138.html?cid=74&gat =review#rid:142652 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 08/30/2010 title of review: "A sunset cannot last forever" rating: * * * * review: It is hard to miss the religious and moral growth dimensions of James Fenimore Cooper's 1844 novel, MILES WALLINGFORD. This is the concluding half of a two-part, first person narrative of New York and the world from 1897 to 1844. Part One is AFLOAT AND ASHORE. The tale's hero, Miles Wallingford, at the close of the first and beginning of the second novel has just rescued from drowning in the Hudson river rich young Manhattanite Andrew Drewett. Andrew is, to all appearances, Miles's successful rival for the hand of Miss Lucy Hardinge, with whom orphaned Miles and his younger sister Grace had been raised after the death of their parents. The appointed guardian of Miles and Grace, till Miles's majority in 1803, is the neighborhood Episcopalian priest, Rev. Mr. Hardinge. Hardinge has a very flawed son, Rupert. Rupert's selfishness propels much of the plot of the two novels. Traveling toward Saratoga Springs on the same ship as Andrew Drewett are his mother, Rupert Hardinge and Rupert's new fiancee, the charming but calculating Englishwoman Emily Merton. Alas for Miles's ailing 19-year old sister Grace, she is cruising the Hudson with Miles, his favorite slave Neb Clabonny and their old shipmate Moses Marble. Grace had recently been cruelly jilted for Emily by Rupert which whom she had been secretly engaged since age 15. Seeing Rupert once again as the two vessels pass close by and overhearing him say unkind things about her, ultra-sensitive Grace's death comes all the faster. In her dying days Grace is attended by Rupert's younger sister and her best friend since childhood, Lucy Hardinge as well as by her brother, her domestic slave Chloe and sorrowing black slaves of Clawbonny Farm. Grace forgives Rupert and commands her vengeful brother to do the same. She also commissions him to give $20,000 from her estate to her onetime lover, so that he can start anew with his future bride Emily. Grace's death scene is as Christian as anything in English literature before John Henry Newman's great poem, "The Dream of Gerontius," set to music by Sir Edward Elgar. This call to "love your enemies" resonates through the rest of the novel and inspires the improbably good death of the old mariner Moses Marble. He was never positively evil, but only in his final months at sea with Miles, Lucy and their four children did he find Jesus. There is far more than religion, romance and moral growth in this novel. The Hudson River comes alive through Cooper's pen. Amid his mixed feelings about saving his rival, he sees for the first time a beautiful stretch of the river at sundown. Alas, however, "A sunset cannot last forever" (Ch. 1). Roughly 2/3 of MILES WALLINGFORD is about Miles's sea voyaging from Manhattan with goods for Hamburg. It is larded with nautical detail. As an American neutral in 1803-4, Miles has to run an impossible gauntlet between warring France and England. He is twice captured, twice escapes, but in the end loses his ship, the Dawn, and is a ruined man. For the first time in his life he knows poverty, including debtors prison in Manhattan. Miles, though a sailor, is also a good, non-fanatical Anglican Christian. His faith is tried like Job's and Jonah's. Lucy is always waiting for him, though it takes him far too long to realize. At novel's end they have been happily and fruitfully wed for 40 years. And Miles is on his knees thanking God. -OOO- recommended reading and music: -- James Fenimore Cooper - AFLOAT AND ASHORE -- John Henry Newman - "The Dream of Gerontius" -- Sir Edward Elgar - "The Dream of Gerontius" (as conducted by Sir John Barbirolli) http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Miles-Wallingford/ James-Fenimore-Cooper/e/9781426448669/?itm= 1&USRI=miles+wallingford+(large+print+edition) =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 08/30/2010 title of review: "I loved that boy better, even, than a Yankee loves cucumbers" rating: * * * * review: Some people read Shakespeare's HENRY IV and HENRY V more for Sir John Falstaff than for the Plantagenet Prince Hal. Others read the first historical novel, Sir Walter Scott's 1814 WAVERLEY, for its insights into Bonnie Prince Charlie Stewart rather than for its "wavering" young hero. And so it is with me in the two part 1844 novel by James Fenimore Cooper arbitrarily divided into AFLOAT AND ASHORE and MILES WALLINGFORD. I find my thoughts and chuckles returning most often to a crusty old sea dog born around 1750 as "Oloff or Oliver... Van Duzer Wetmore" (Ch. 3). Though secretly married, his mother placed the baby with another till the marriage could be made public. But the evil guardian in turn exposed the baby boy on a marble tombstone. At an orphanage he was dubbed Moses Marble and so he is called most of the time in the two novels. When 17-year old Miles Wallingford and his 18-year friend and housemate Rupert Hardinge ran away for a year at sea in 1797, crusty old Moses Marble, first mate of a merchantman bound for China, took Miles under his wing. A bit more than a year later, Marble persuaded a ship's master to take on Miles as third mate for a second, three-year trading voyage round the world. And for a third voyage together Marble rejoins as first mate Miles and Miles's loyal black slave Neb Clawbonny aboard newly of age Miles Wallingford's own vessel, the Dawn. They sail for Hamburg in 1803, returning home to New York in 1804 after surviving many trials and adventures but having also lost the Dawn. For a short soul-trying time, Miles is poor and his farm estate Clawbonny is sold for debts. Steadily, Moses Marble improbably grows into Miles's closest friend after Miles's doomed sister Grace, after his sweetheart from childhood Lucy Hardinge and after Reverend Hardinge, guardian of the two orphaned Wallingford siblings. During their second voyage together, the ship of Marble and Wallingford is seized treacherously by savage Indians of the northwestern coast of North America. Marble takes command of the recaptured vessel (both lost and recaptured thanks to Miles) after the savages under chief "Smudge" have tomahawked the ship's master. Against Miles's wishes, Marble retaliates and executes Smudge by hanging. For the rest of his life this barely religious man Marble wonders if he done right by Smudge. Ironically, in old age, Marble is appointed the master of of the Smudge, a trading vessel belonging to now affluent Miles. With the help of Miles and a good dose of coincidence, between the second and third voyages, Marble had been re-united not that many miles down the Hudson from Clawbonny farm with his widowed, aged mother and her orphaned granddaughter. Marble's greatest personal sorrow had always been his ignorance of who he was. He never married, choosing various ships as his lady loves. But he loved Miles's sainted sister Grace and was delighted when Miles and Lucy were married, after many misunderstandings as to whom each other really loved. In a private wedding held before the numerous black slaves of Clawbonny, Moses Marble insisted on being Miles's "brides-maid." He was a master of salty expressions. Thus on their doomed third voyage, drifting in the Atlantic together in a small boat, Moses Marble laments to the only other passenger, Miles's slave Neb Clawbonny, the almost certain drowning death of Neb's master: "'Providence swept him away from us, like,
and we've lost him. Ah's me! -- well,
I loved that boy better, even, than a Yankee loves cucumbers.'
"This may be thought an odd comparison to cross a drowsy imagination, but it was one Marble often made; and if eating the fruit, morning noon and night, will vindicate its justice, the mate stood exonerated from everything like exaggeration." (Ch. 23) Later, in a letter to Miles (now restored to ownership of Clawbonny), Moses Marble tells of his reception after shipwreck during the third voyage by his ancient mother: "Here I have been, moored head and starn,
these ten days, as comfortable as heart could wish, in the bosom of my
family. The old woman was right down glad to see me, and she cried like
an alligator, when she heard my story." (Ch. 28)
Towards the second novel's end, Moses Marble dies a good Christian death, in command of the Smudge, as it brings back from Europe Miles and Lucy Wallingford and their four children. Moses had never had a systematically Christian upbringing. But first from Miles and then from his mother he had accepted the utility of frequent Bible reading. The hardest Christian lesson for him to learn, and that grudgingly in his deathbed hammock out in the Gulf Stream, was to "forgive thine enemies." He still hated Chief Smudge for killing his Captain. But thanks to the loving ministrations of Lucy Wallingford, the old sea dog finally made his peace with Jesus and a good death at well. He was sorely missed because much loved by all who knew Moses Marble. I am not saying to ignore the two novels' hero, Miles Wallingford. He tells his own story very well and honestly, concluding it in 1844 on his knees thanking God for his marriage and offspring. He mistakenly believed that his childhood sweetheart preferred another man. Miles also found it hard to forgive his boyhood friend Rupert Hardinge, Lucy's selfish brother, for breaking the heart and speeding the death of sister Grace Wallingford. Like Jonah before him, Miles knew terrors at sea. Like Job, Miles also suffered at the hands of God, but kept the faith. Other memorable characters include the black slaves of Clawbonny Farm. In 1827 New York State by statute freed all slaves within its borders. Miles had tried and failed earlier to free his personal servant Neb but was refused. When Neb wed Chloe in 1804, both accepted the manumission papers but quietly filed them away. They both belonged to Miles and he to them. End of story. He might free them. They would never free him. MILES WALLINGFORD is also a great sea adventure tale, in the literary genre invented by James Fenimore Cooper. Two-thirds of its length is given over to winds, tides, currents, minutiae of tackle and shipboard gear, cannonades at sea, capture, recaptures and stern chases. There is something in these two volumes for every reader's taste. -OOO- tags: james fenimore cooper, slavery in new york before 1827, wars of france and england, the hudson river, american politics http://www.amazon.com/Miles-Wallingford-Sequel- Afloat-Ashore/dp/1426448236/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s =books&qid=1282920745&sr=8-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com review title: The too early death of a forgiving Christian woman Written: Aug 30, 2010 Product Rating: * * * * * Pros: One of the most moving deaths in English literature. Young love embraced, and destroyed. Cons: 2/3 life on sailing vessels, MILES WALLINGFORD is awash in minutiae of rigging and tackle. The Bottom Line: Plot elements are in balance: passion and family, character growth and character deformation, life at sea and in 19th Century America, including the lives of slaves. Two good deaths. aohcapablanca's Full Review: James Fenimore Cooper - Miles Wallingford James Fenimore Cooper's two interconnected novels of 1844, AFLOAT AND ASHORE and MILES WALLINGFORD are, so far as sheer bulk goes, one long sea adventure tale. As readers know, the sea adventure tale is a modern literary genre invented by Cooper in his 1823 novel, THE PILOT. Sea there is a'plenty in MILES WALLINGFORD. Perhaps 2/3 of its text is spent sailing the Atlantic, mainly on a doomed trading voyage to Hamburg in 1803 - 1804 when Napoleon and England are at war. America, however, is not. And Miles Wallingford's own vessel, the Dawn, trusts to the laws of nation to protect both it and him. They do not. Warships of both France and the United Kingdom, in succession, capture the Dawn, remove its crews but then are imaginatively recaptured by Captain Wallingford, by his crusty old friend and First Mate Moses Marble and by Wallingford's body slave Neb Clawbonny. But the Dawn goes down in a colossal storm that catches her off the coast of Ulster. And the three friends return as survivors to Manhattan with their leader financially ruined -- at least for a time. The two novels of 1844 are also a love story: mainly an often vexed one between Miles Wallingford and years younger Lucy Hardinge, daughter of the guardian of Miles and his sister Grace. He is the neighborhood Episcopalian pastor, Rev. Mr. Hardinge, also father of a selfish young son, Rupert. Rupert's refusal to honor his secret engagement to marry Grace destroys first her happiness and then her fragile hold on life itself. It also complicates the delicate, fraying bonds of romance between Miles and Rupert's sister Lucy. The two novels AFLOAT AND ASHORE and MILES WALLINGFORD are, in addition, encyclopedic -- in their sea lore, including minutiae
of rigging a sailing vessel,
-- in studies of slavery in New York prior to its abolition in 1827, -- in attitudes toward a highly partisan American press during the Napoleonic wars -- and in descriptions of slowly dissolving American social stratifications. But the two novels are also powerfully imaginative religious works of fiction. Their author, James Fenimore Cooper, writing two decades after THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS had brought him worldwide acclaim, was all his life a devout, thoughtful Anglican Christian. He loved that Church's ritual and its middle course between born again enthusiasm and dogmatic frigidity. Cooper made his hero Miles Wallingford a solid if unostentatious American Episcopalian of the seagoing variety. Late in life Miles and his then wife Lucy bring crusty old sea dog Moses Marble to accept Jesus's message of forgiving one's enemies. Marble had executed, to set an example four decades earlier, a treacherous Indian chief dubbed Smudge by the shipboard whites. Teen-aged Miles had urged Moses not to hang Smudge, but the recaptured ship's crew demanded vengeance for the tomahawking of their Captain. In my opinion, the religious highlight of MILES WALLINGFORD is the slow, lingering death of Miles's sister Miss Grace Wallingford. Miles, Marble and slave Neb had just completed a three-year round the world voyage. On returning to Manhattan in 1803, Miles finds his sister pining away after their boyhood friend Rupert Hardinge had broken their secret engagement and become attached to a young Englishwoman, whose life had been saved by Miles in London on his first voyage. She is Miss Emily Merton. And Rupert's sister Lucy, not without reason, suspects that her silent sweetheart Miles inclines more to Emily than to Lucy. A chance encounter by two passenger boats on the Hudson river near Albany plunges fragile Grace into her final descent toward death, after she sees Rupert with Emily and hears from his own lips that he cares nothing for Grace -- whom he knows to be ill and being nursed by his own sister. In Grace's final weeks on earth, her best friend -- Lucy Hardinge, Rupert's sister -- joins Miles and Reverend Hardinge as they prepare Grace to meet her Maker. Grace now longs to "dissolve and be with Christ." But she still loves the rascally Rupert and insists, in ordering her worldly affairs, that her brother Miles secretly make over $20,000 -- 9/10th of her anticipated estate -- to her onetime fiance Rupert so that he and his new bride Emily can start life together worthily. It is as hard for Miles as an ordinary Christian in 1803 to forgive his sister's unwitting killer as it will be decades later for a dying Moses Marble to forgive the savage Indian Chief Smudge. But both events happen. And Miles and Moses remain under the mystical influence, as I read the text, of saintly Grace's good death. Read about it in Chapters IV and V. For what it's worth, the Christian death of 19-year old Grace Wallingford evokes for me Evelyn Waugh's 1945 BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and its deathbed "conversion" of Lord Marchmain. More directly resonating with the death of Grace is Cardinal John Henry Newman's great poem, "The Dream of Gerontius," set to immortal music by Sir Edward Elgar. If you have not heard this, listen to a recording by Sir John Barbirolli. Some, perhaps most, Christians roll lightly off their tongues Jesus's injunction to "do good to them that persecute you." But even in fiction it is hard to find Christians who would not deep down inside prefer to see something bad happen to a person who wrongs them, especially when that wrong is death. MILES WALLINGFORD is great on several levels and for more reasons than one. It stands out, I believe, however, for the saintly death of Grace Wallingford and for that death's enduring impact on her brother and, indirectly, on her brother's great friend, Captain Moses Marble and Marble's own good death. -OOO- CODA: thank you, category lead PESTYSIDE/Patsy for making these two interlocking novels, AFLOAT AND ASHORE and MILES WALLINGFORD easily reviewable by us epinionators. Recommended: * * * * * Yes http://www99.epinions.com/review/James_Fenimore_Cooper _Miles_Wallingford_epi/content_523083222660 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= file: cooper_miles http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/cooper_miles.html |