Being an Account of the Voyage of the Cutter Direction, Arthur S. Allen, Jr., Captain, to Greenland in the Summer of 1929 together with the Log, letters and other Memoranda.
From the Foreword: "After the death of Arthur S. Allen, Jr., in September, 1929, a group of his father’s friends, all of them outstanding in the field of fine printing and design, suggested embodying in permanent and beautiful form the ship’s log which the boy kept as captain of the Direction on his voyage to Greenland. This book is the result. It was decided to add to the log letters and other documents preliminary to the voyage, in order to make clear the background of the undertaking. Some explanatory text has also been necessary to make the story a continuous whole. As far as possible, however, the account is given in the, boy’s own words, and the log itself has been left substantially as he wrote it. There were disadvantages in this plan, since the brief entries were intended by him only as a nautical record of the Direction’s progress, and as reminders for himself of the high points of the trip. The account of the cruise which he began to write for “Yachting” after his return shows how he would have expanded these notes, had he lived. But although there are thus parts of his narrative as it appears in this book so telegraphic as to lack complete clarity, it was felt that this lack is more than compensated by the vividness of a first hand story. Also, at some points the very things that are left out are significant. Perhaps pages of description would have been less effective in summing up an impression of St. Clair Bay, Labrador, than this: “Poor people. Many dogs. Dreary life.” “Rum and discussion” gives a skeleton picture of nights in harbor, when the crew were “at home” to visitors from ashore. And while “Blowing pretty hard” may seem a rather elliptical description of a storm at sea, it is stimulating to the imagination—and entirely characteristic of Sam Allen. For the same reasons a good deal of technical detail was included in the chapters which describe the building and fitting out of the Direction. Not only does this material indicate the immense amount of thought and labor that went into the preparations, but it gives an excellent idea of Sam Allen’s competence, and the joy he took, in his chosen “direction.”
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