Publishers Fathom the Deep Blue Sea; Nautical Adventure Tales Put the Wind in Book Sales

Jason and Odysseus, call your agents. Publishers haverediscovered the mythic voyage.

Sated in recent years with whiny victimization books andnovels of academic navel gazing, publishers are setting sail forheroic tales of man -- and woman -- against the sea, even if theyhave to unearth century-old manuscripts to do so.

Spurred by such varied moneymakers as Sebastian Junger'snonfiction bestseller "The Perfect Storm," the movie "Titanic" andthe swashbuckling sea novels of Patrick O'Brian, publishers andagents are signing up watery long shots young and old.So extreme is the phenomenon that Penguin Putnam last summerpaid $1 million for a retelling of the 178-year-old whaling storythat inspired Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" -- even though a bookdetailing that story has been in print at least since 1981.There are tales of nautical treasure hunters and shipboardescape, of antarctic explorers and island-cruising families, of solosailors nursing wounded hearts and boat-bum detectives diving tofind out who done it.This weekend at the mammoth U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis --billed as the largest such in the world, attracting nauticaltire-kickers from all over the globe -- McGraw-Hill will showcaseits latest maritime author, Alvah Simon, who writes of sailing his36-foot cutter to northern Greenland and surviving three months ofdarkness frozen deep in the arctic ice.A few years ago a book like Simon's would have been consignedto the specialized category of "nautical book," lucky to receive afirst printing of 5,000, said his editor, Jonathan Eaton. But seastories these days are breaking out of the pigeonhole to a generalaudience: "North to the Night" will get a first printing of 25,000."I don't think it's all just the sea in this current trend,"says Patricia Chui of W.W. Norton, which published "The PerfectStorm" and has just brought out Andrea Barrett's arctic novel, "TheVoyage of the Narwhal." "I think it's a whole man-against-naturething." Jon Krakauer's runaway bestseller "Into Thin Air," about adeadly season among climbers on Mount Everest, is part of the sametrend, she says."I think there's sort of a fascination now with real peoplehaving incredible adventures in places most of us would never eventhink of going," said Chui. "We're surrounded by so much technologythese days a lot of us are lucky to make it out of the house."The heroic adventure tale, of course, lies at the very heartof human culture. Centuries before Homer and Sinbad, travelers weremesmerizing less mobile folk around the campfire with tales ofchallenges met and hardships overcome on mythic journeys. Forcountries with a maritime tradition, the sea has always been thewellspring of great narrative because of its vastness, its mysteryand its awesome power. To psychologist Carl Jung, it symbolized thecollective unconscious that all people share.Since the passing of the transatlantic liners, however,publishers and bookstores have ghettoized sea stories, presumingthem to be of interest only to boat owners.With a few exceptions, like Peter Benchley's novel "Jaws" orJohn McPhee's nonfiction "Looking for a Ship," sea stories untilrecently have received little promotion and been left to, well, sinkor swim.Perhaps the best example has been the novels of PatrickO'Brian. The books to which they are most often compared are theHoratio Hornblower novels of British writer C.S. Forester, which,like O'Brian's, are built around the adventures of an officer in theRoyal Navy during the Napoleonic wars.When Forester was writing in the 1950s, his popular Hornblowernovels were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, surely the mostmainstream and middlebrow of mass-circulation magazines even then.Yet O'Brian, whose more ambitious efforts in the same genre beganappearing in 1970, was virtually ignored in this country for nearly20 years. Finally brought to American readers eight years ago byW.W. Norton, his novels have since been praised in the New YorkTimes as "the greatest historical novels ever written," and O'Brianhimself has been compared to Proust. There are now more than 3.5million copies in print, and so rabid are his readers that theypushed his latest book, "The Hundred Days," to No. 5 on Internetbookseller Amazon.com's bestseller list even before its officialpublication date last week.Yet seven years ago, before the boom took hold, the onlyplaces you could find the books were yacht chandleries, harborsidebookstores and other salty print outlets, pigeonholed alongsidevolumes dedicated to spar varnishing and hull design.That has now changed. Henry Holt and Co. has launched aseries called Heart of Oak Sea Classics with the republication ofDudley Pope's "The Black Ship," about a bloody 18th-century mutinyin the Royal Navy; Frederick Marryat's "Peter Simple," about a youngmidshipman in the Royal Navy of Horatio Nelson; and "DoctorDogbody's Leg," James Norman Hall's 50-year-old collection of thesea stories of a peg-legged sailor.Merritt Communications, a Connecticut company, is followingsuit with an imprint called Capstan Press, which will publish suchvenerable sea stories as Jack London's "Cruise of the Snark."Perhaps the most telling example of the sea tales phenomenonis Penguin Putnam's $1 million bid for "In the Heart of the Sea," amanuscript about the 1820 wreck of a whaling ship sunk by a whale."That's a bit more than we pay," laconically noted TomJohnson, associate director of operations at the University Press ofNew England, which has had the same basic story in print since 1981.That would be "Stove by a Whale" by Thomas Farel Heffernan, aboutthe sinking of the whaler Essex in 1820 off Ecuador. It is based onthe 1821 "Narrative" by Owen Chase, one of the few surviving membersof the crew. Heffernan's book includes considerable scholarlybackground on Chase and his family's place in Nantucket whaling.According to Johnson, "It strikes me as rather odd" thatPenguin Putnam would pay such a price for another version of thesame story, but he says it's symptomatic of the current scrambleamong publishers for good sea stories to retell. His own press, hesays, plans to republish "Boon Island," a pirate story by historicalcraftsman Kenneth Roberts, whose 50-year-old novels like "LydiaBailey," "Rabble in Arms" and "Northwest Passage" are consideredclassics of the genre.Kristine Puopolo of Penguin Putnam said she and others in thecompany knew of Heffernan's book on the Essex shipwreck, and of aversion of the story told by Thomas Nickerson, another survivor inthe crew, which the Nantucket Historical Society published in 1981.But she said the $1 million retelling she purchased for PenguinPutnam is a narrative treatment by Nantucket historian NathanielPhilbrick."This is a wonderful and compelling bit of American historythat too few people know about," she said, "when every lamp was litwith whale oil and Nantucket whalers were the oilmen of their age."She said she agrees with historian Stephen Ambrose that academichistorians in recent years have taken all the "story" -- the lifeand humanity -- out of history by removing it from its traditionalnarrative form."In recent years it's almost like there's more permission totell these stories of survival and incredible hardships overcome theway we once did."Puopolo says "In the Heart of the Sea" won't appear until2000. But next year, she says, Penguin Putnam plans a new edition ofJoshua Slocum's nautical classic "Sailing Alone Around the World."