A Watery Grave

This was a fairly dull read by Joan Druett, although that’s probably just because I don’t find all things nautical particularly interesting, especially when the entire book from beginning to end lacks a single female character (except the dead woman from the first page). The hero, a half-Maori half-American sailor during the nineteenth century stumbles on the mystery and while he’s sailing south with the navy endeavours to solve it. He does, because there really isn’t very much mystery to it at all. While the tidbits of information about being a pacific islander in an increasingly white world during the nineteenth century are interesting, they were too infrequent to hold my attention in this particularly pedestrian novel.