The Pirate. The Three Cutters (1836),
Poor Jack (1840),
Percival Keene (1842),
The Privateer's-Man (1846).
The first of these titles is pure autobiography and, as the author himself admitted, lacks most of the essentials of fiction. The story is of the slightest and most perfunctory, the book being little more than an account of Marryat's own early adventures at sea. David Hannay, in his excellent little Life of Marryat, remarks acutely on the peculiar meanness of the hero's character—a meanness that makes an even more repellant appearance in the last but one of the sea stories—Percival Keene. Seeing that Marryat was writing of himself and that the events in the life of Frank Mildmay must have been easily recognizable by naval contemporaries, it is remarkable that he should present his central figure so unsympathetically, unless he failed to realize the young man's shortcomings. Perhaps in part he saw his mistake, for in the five novels that followed The Naval Officer he offers the reader more respectable but more colourless heroes. When the time came for writing Percival Keene, either he had forgotten the warnings of twelve years before or else he was tired of erecting dummy humanity to placate the idealism of his readers.
The constructional weakness of The Naval Officer Marryat took pains to correct in his succeeding books. Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful and the rest may depend for their vitality and attraction on the excitements encountered by their heroes while voyaging the seas or fighting in the wars. Certainly the by-plots are unimportant and conventional. But the author was careful in them all to give to the course of the heroes' adventures a real prominence and coherence, so that we read with an anxiety to know what happens next and are not, as in The Naval Officer, continually brought up by naval “shop” or invited to feel indignant sympathy with the members of a noble but scurvily treated service.
The Pirate and The Privateer's-Man are exciting tales of ocean brigandage, the latter having in addition an antiquarian interest, for the first portion of the story is based on the actual life-record of an old time sea-rover. Poor Jack, although told in the first person and comprising scenes on shipboard and adventurous happenings at sea of a kind to suggest comparison with Mr. Midshipman Easy, has an historical interest apart from its value as fiction, because it is an account of Greenwich Hospital, in those days a retreat for wounded seamen.
Two groups remain among the stories of Frederick Marryat. Snarleyow (1837) and The Phantom Ship (1839) stand definitely apart from the rest of the novels. Both tell of Dutch seafaring in the old days and both introduce a strong element of the weird and the mysterious. That Marryat should in these books have come under the influence of the “terror” motive in fiction is surprising and interesting. After reading Japhet or Mr. Midshipman Easy one would declare that nothing was farther from the talent of their author than an excursion into the “horrid.” And yet both Snarleyow and The Phantom Ship are excellent books, which rank high among Marryat's novels for liveliness and for characterization and, in addition, merit notice for their fearsomeness. Of their value as historical documents I am unqualified to speak, but it may be presumed that before writing them the author studied the lives and methods of seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch mariners, for both books are circumstantially staged and show no desire to shirk description of contemporary fact.
Of the stories written definitely for children the best known (and rightly) is Masterman Ready (1841-1842). It was followed by The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet (1843); The Settlers in Canada (1844); The Mission; or, Scenes in Africa (1845); The Children of the New Forest (1847); and The Little Savage (1848-1849).
Monsieur Violet is an improbable and tedious tale of Red Indians and Mormons. The rest—with the exception of The Children of the New Forest, which is a story of Cavaliers and Roundheads—tell in one form or another the eternal tale of young adventurers in wild countries.