Stowaway (Karen Hesse)

Stowaway
Karen Hesse
Aladdin
Fiction, YA Historical Fiction
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In late August 1768, eleven-year-old Nicholas Young runs away from the butcher to whom he was apprenticed by his uncaring father. He pays off three sailors to help him hide aboard a ship bound far away - where, he doesn't care, so long as he's away from England for a good, long time. The sailors dutifully found the ship with the most remote itinerary they could find. Thus, Nick becomes a stowaway aboard the HMS Endeavor, under the command of Captain Cook. Their mission is to circumnavigate the globe and help chart the vast uncharted reaches of the southern Pacific and Indian oceans. With the ship travels a contingent of educated gentlemen to record new discoveries, of which there will be many in this voyage. For three years, Nick records his adventures in his daily journal, adventures filled with strange sights, rare wonders, conflicts, peril, and death.

REVIEW: According to the author in the post-story notes, there was, as a matter of record, an eleven-year-old boy named Nicholas Young who appears on the Endeavor's roster only after eight months' sailing: he could very well have been a stowaway, as Hesse suggests here, or just an unrecorded boy brought on board by a sailor to help with his mending and other menial tasks, as was not uncommon in those days. Little else is known about him, except that he was educated enough to write and that Young Nick's Head in New Zealand was named thus because he was the first to spot it from the rigging. The rest is sheer speculation on the part of the author. I wished she'd done more speculation and less journaling. The majority of this book is brief, uninformative journal entries, interspersed with Nick's observations of his shipmates. I never got a great sense of Nick as an interesting character with much to contribute aside from being a set of eyes looking over the crew's shoulders. What issues and conflicts he does bring to the table - his resentment over how his father treated him in England, his efforts to teach a sailor friend to read, his long-running rivalry with a cruel midshipman, and his efforts to make himself useful aboard ship - seem to ebb and flow around the edges, with most revelations and resolutions happening in offstage anticlimaxes. Cook's danger-fraught journey and the collection of conflicting personalities and goals aboard ship should have made for more interesting reading, but not here. I have the impression that this is a book teachers make students read in an attempt to personalize one of the landmark journeys of the Age of Discovery... and, like most schoolwork, it will be read dutifully by glaze-eyed kids who still won't make a personal connection to Cook's voyage, and who will promptly forget most of what they read as soon as the test is done.