Richard Woodman was a fairly prolific writer of British nautical fiction, a career that benefited greatly from his own years of service at sea. I have read and enjoyed only three of his novels to date -- the first three in the 14-book Nathaniel Drinkwater series -- but I recently received a McBooks Press reprint of his stand-alone novel Endangered Species ... and, after recently learning of Woodman's death at age 80, I decided to tackle that one next.

It's good, very good. And wholly different from the Drinkwater books (although a young British naval officer named Drinkwater -- presumably a descendent? -- does make a brief appearance near the end).

Endangered Species is set in a very different era. Rather than the Age of Sail, Captain John Mackinnon works in a more modern age and is among the last of a dying breed -- a seaman in England's merchant navy, which is rapidly dwindling toward the end of Mackinnon's career. Set in what appears to be the late 1980s or early '90s, it describes the last voyage of Mackinnon's ship, the Matthew Flinders, to Hong Kong, at the end of which the crew will be paid off and the ship sold to Chinese businessmen.

Woodman's Mackinnon is quite introspective, and perhaps even a bit self-referential. As he observes at one point in the book: "The infinite variety of events that supposedly accompanied a career at sea were largely a figment of the imagination of novelists." Well, there is a variety of events at play here, too, on this emotional turmoil of a ship on its final cruise.

The primary antagonist here is the threat of a major typhoon compounded by a miscalculation on the charts, further complicated by the desperate rescue of a boatload of Vietnamese refugees adrift in rough seas, a harrowing amputation in the officers' lounge, a motherless infant, a pervasive STD, a hijacking and mutiny, and death.

Woodman provides detailed explanations of the workings of boats and weather, with wild, personal, terrifying descriptions of the storm that confronts them. He also offers lingering ponderings on man's purpose, theology and the evolving life of a seaman in changing times, bracketed by flashbacks to Mackinnon's harrowing experiences during World War II and the post-war era.

Woodman was an excellent writer, and Endangered Species exposes a side of his writing I hadn't seen before. I can thoroughly recommend this book, and I certainly look forward to exploring more of his novels in the future.