The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson

First published: 1912

Type of work: Travel sketches and impressions

Time of work: 1912

Locale: England, at sea, South America

Principal Personages:

• The Author
• The Skipper, captain of the ship
• The Ship’s Doctor

Analysis

Although the world has changed a great deal since this book was written, The Sea and the Jungle is still a classic of its kind, not only because it tells an interesting story of a journey away from the humdrum existence of everyday living, but also because it is an example of travel writing at its best. Tomlinson was working on a newspaper when the opportunity arose for him to make the long journey to South America aboard the Capella, a tramp steamer which was to deliver industrial supplies and coal deep in the jungles of Brazil. He made his decision quickly and was signed on the ship as purser.

Tomlinson’s narrative is unassuming and straightforward. It tells of the voyage of the Capella from Swansea to Para, on the Brazilian coast, and then some two thousand miles up the Amazon River and its tributaries to the small settlement of Porto Velho, thence to the Barbados, and on to Tampa, Florida, where Tomlinson left the ship to take a train to New York and make a fast passage home to England. Despite the simplicity of his method, however, the author is not a simple man, and his perceptions and writing style make this a revealing and exciting book.

As in many travel books, The Sea and the Jungle contains four kinds of material: the narrative of the events of the trip; lengthy and detailed descriptions of the things which caught the author’s interest; stories that were told to the author by seamen and various unusual men he encountered in South America; and the reflections on life, nature, and mankind that the circumstances of the journey provoked in the author’s mind. These elements, skillfully blended, give the book its structure, vividness of detail, and stylistic excellence.

Aside from the bare outline of the major events of the trip—the embarkation, the arrival, the delivery of the cargo—the narrative is filled with the little daily occurrences that give such a book its real life. It is in this part of the writing that Tomlinson best fulfills the purpose implied by his statement: “This is a travel book for honest men.” In his full attention to the hardships and discomforts of the trip, Tomlinson makes evident his conviction that escape from dullness may be exciting but seldom comfortable. The insects, the danger, and, perhaps most of all, the incredible heat are the enemies of comfort; and Tomlinson makes the reader acutely, even painfully, aware of them constantly.

The author was, however, gifted with a great interest in practically every aspect of travel without the bent for making didactic judgments of other people and other lands that often irritate readers of travel books. Occasionally, as in his admiration for the rebellion of a black heifer that was being transported upstream to one of the railroad camps, he is moved to comment upon the human qualities of nonhuman things such as animals, insects, and the jungle itself, which Tomlinson saw as a brooding, mysterious giant which silently tolerated the invasion of men but which held a secret that no man could wring from it.

Along with the less inviting aspects of the journey, Tomlinson presents whatever he found beautiful or interesting, matters which he describes with great sensitivity and a fine technique. Of course, the first step in good description is accurate and imaginative observation; after this comes the expression of this perception so that the reader may share it. In this book the author combines careful observation with artfully expressed, often nearly impressionistic, description. The two main subjects for the description are, naturally, the sea and the jungle. The voyage to Para, which takes up roughly the first third of the book, takes the writer and his shipmates from a cold, wet England to the warmth and brilliant color of equatorial waters.

The main feature of the voyage, from a descriptive standpoint, is the storm which struck the ship shortly after its departure. Tomlinson’s description of this event ranks with the best such passages in Conrad. Perhaps the most striking quality is the originality of the comparisons, always an important device of the describer. A wave, for example, seems to Tomlinson’s eye “as a heaped mass of polished obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal fractures in its glass.”

Once arrived at Para, Tomlinson devotes his descriptive attention to the jungle and its inhabitants in an equally detailed but more personal way. Here he had more time to observe and reflect the wider variety of items that engaged his attention. Pages are given over to the mass of green foliage that lines the river’s edge. Paragraphs are devoted to one insect. Through it all, without an excess of direct comment but more by the nature of his descriptions, Tomlinson’s intense interest in the whole panorama is shown. He is overcome with delight at sighting a morpho butterfly and compares it to a little piece of blue sky flitting about the forest.

Tomlinson’s reputation as a stylist is high, and descriptive passages in this book show his writing at a high level. His mixture of long and short sentences and clauses, each compact and full of concrete details and carefully chosen adjectives, is a lesson in writing vivid but highly detailed description without becoming dull and seeming long-winded.

No doubt much easier to write—because their very material is sure to be interesting to the reader—are the several stories that Tomlinson includes at well-spaced intervals. These tales range from the fantastic seamen’s yarn about Bill Moffat’s encounter with Davy Jones to the chilling story of how Captain Davis’ interest in shrunken heads led him to an unfortunate first-hand experience of the phenomenon. Once more, Tomlinson refrains from comment, simply allowing the narrative itself to impress the reader with the strange nature of the teller and the peculiar facets of life to be found in these remote places.

The foregoing kinds of material will delight most readers, but many may be repelled by Tomlinson’s too-frequent statements of his view of things that are not really connected with the essence of The Sea and the Jungle. Certainly the main idea, and the one which impelled him to leave London and go with the Skipper on the trip, is bound to appeal to many people. The thought of escape to another world, preferably an exotic one, occupies everyone’s mind at some time or another, but the reader may well lose sympathy with Tomlinson’s repeated statement that the reader has not really eaten, or slept, or appreciated human companionship until he has done so under circumstances similar to those enjoyed by the author. Here Tomlinson comes close to preaching, and it mars the effect of his work.

Several outright homilies castigate the spirit of commercialism that was ruining the beauties of nature along the Amazon and was sending to death or misery brave men who often had no real idea of why they were being so sacrificed. In 1912, Tomlinson’s audience had not had so much time as the current reader to become weary of declarations like this one: “I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in the pageant of humanity.” His admiration for the men who are the victims of this kind of mind is a less disturbing feature of the book, and his statements about the beauty and mystery of the jungle and the life that is lived there are quite fitting. It is really the condemnation of things apart from his direct experience on the trip, but things which this experience causes him to ponder on, that seems out of place or obtrusive, breaking the mood and tonal quality of the whole. Tomlinson’s sarcasm on the Poor Law, for instance, weakens the effect of his writing.

These passages—all toward the end of the book—are, however, insignificant in comparison to the rest of The Sea and the Jungle, and Tomlinson’s achievement is great in spite of them. Few writers, in either travel books or fiction, have been able more skillfully to capture the spirit of a place, its human implications, and to express them in such a well-controlled writing style and with such finely balanced sensitivity.