Novel: The Cruise of the Jasper B

Overview

Don Marquis’s 1916 novel The Cruise of the Jasper B is a breezy, mock-heroic romance that lampoons swashbucklers, pirate yarns, and Gilded Age melodrama while genuinely indulging their pleasures. Built around a derelict but beloved schooner and an heir with a troublesome legacy, it blends farce, adventure, and high-flown sentiment into a playful critique of modern America’s waning taste for grand gestures. The title ship is less a vehicle than a talisman: a floating inheritance from an audacious ancestor and a test of whether chivalric fantasy can survive in a world of mortgages, lawyers, and headlines.

Plot

The novel centers on the last scion of a once-dashing line of freebooters and adventurers who has inherited two things of dubious value: a decaying mansion and the Jasper B, a weather-beaten schooner that once carried his forebear to improbable glories. A family legend, enshrined in a legal instrument as elaborate as a ballad, threatens to strip him of everything unless he fulfills a romantic condition by a fixed deadline. The stipulation, as absurd as it is grand, essentially requires him to prove that his life is animated by real love and daring, not idle posing, before the clock and the courts run out.

Debt, a predatory cousin, and a platoon of officious functionaries close in, convinced the heir is a decorative relic. He meets a modern young woman who is amused by his archaic flourishes yet intrigued by the sincerity behind them. When the plotters move to seize the estate, the pair bolt for the Jasper B. What follows is a harum-scarum chase across city streets and harbor waters, with legal papers waving like cutlasses, policemen and process servers as comic foils, and the schooner creaking into sudden purpose.

The voyage is a pageant of set pieces that send up the entire vocabulary of gallant fiction: midnight boardings, deckside duels that descend into wrestling, rain-slick escapes, mistaken identities, and a storm that is both atmospheric and conveniently timed. Amid the chaos the heir is forced to do what family legend prescribes: stop declaiming and act. Each improvised feat shaves minutes from the deadline and peels back the burlesque to a credible romance. At the last possible moment the condition is met, by deed, not posture, nullifying the villain’s claim. The Jasper B, patched and glorified by adventure, becomes both proof and prize.

Characters and Setting

Marquis populates the tale with affectionate caricatures: a hero who quotes chivalry but learns to practice it; a heroine whose wit trims his rhetoric and steadies his nerves; a grasping relative and his sleek legal retinue; harbor rats, bohemians, and bystanders who treat romance as street theater. The setting toggles between a metropolis of ledgers and headlines and the liminal space of the waterfront, where myths still feel usable and a shabby ship can serve as a stage for transformation.

Themes and Tone

The novel’s central argument is that style without courage is posturing, but courage without style is a waste of joy. It mocks inherited privilege while preserving the thrill of inherited stories, arguing that legacy only matters when renewed by choice. The Jasper B itself is a symbol of imagination: a relic that becomes a vehicle when someone dares to sail it. Marquis balances parody with tenderness; the tone is urban, irreverent, and quick with wisecracks, yet willing to grant that hearts, like ships, sometimes need a dramatic wind.

Style and Legacy

Marquis writes in a mingled idiom, mock-epic flourishes colliding with newsroom snap and Village bohemia, producing a brisk, cinematic rhythm long before the book’s later silent-film adaptation. The Cruise of the Jasper B stands as a lively proof that satire need not cancel romance; it can clear space for it, and even shove it laughing toward the horizon.