In 1950 the Londoner, H. M. Tomlinson, journalist, novelist, essayist, traveller, published a collection of essays under the title The Face of the Earth. One wonders to how many of those who chanced upon it the name of its author evoked nostalgic memories of other of his books not reread in years. To most readers born between the 1914 and 1939 wars the name would probably be no more than just that—a name. But to older readers was there recollection of The Sea and the Jungle, Old Junk, London River, Tide Marks? The essays collected in The Face of the Earth themselves constitute a backward glance. They are, the author remarks, "remembrances … salvaged from books lost in the last war." "It was thought proper," he goes on to say, "to save them; oblivion is inevitable, but it need not come too soon." And he was right; oblivion need not and should not come too soon to his work. There is place for the minor as well as the major, for the quietly persistent tone as well as the shout. One can be delighted and bemused and moved, if in a different way, by Charles Lamb and Thoreau as well as by Herman Melville and Dostoyevsky. Henry Major Tomlinson has been persistent. Although the bulk of his best work was written prior to the outbreak of the second war, at no time since then has he dropped from sight completely. During the war appeared The Wind Is Rising (1941), reactions to life in wartime Britain; in 1950, Malay Waters, a tribute to the officers, the men, and the little ships of the Straits Steamship Company, "coasting out of Singapore and Penang in peace and war," as the subtitle reads; in 1953, in his eightieth year, A Mingled Yarn, a collection much like The Face of the Earth, consisting for the most part of earlier essays and sketches; in addition to these, scattered essays that have appeared in a popular travel magazine and elsewhere, and early in 1957 The Trumpet Shall Sound, a novel. It is, however, with the Tomlinson of the years prior to the 1940's that I wish to concern myself—not the writer of such novels as Gallions Reach (1927) and All Our Yesterdays (1930), but the meditative observer, the traveller, the social critic, the author of The Sea and the Jungle (1912), Old Junk (1918), London River (1921), Tide Marks (1924), Gifts of Fortune (1926), and "Log of a Voyage, 1935," published in The Turn of the Tide in 1947.

A frequenter of dockside Thames, as he is seen in London River, almost, one hazards, its familiar spirit—he was born in 1873 in one of the shipping parishes—a keenly observant lands-man with a love of the sea in its every mood, a love, albeit, somewhat tempered with a knowledgeable fear, and a voyager on most of the oceans of the world, he has an understanding of ships and those who make their living from them and of the sea in its many aspects. The majority of his best books and essays are about the sea and those who live on it. So much has the sea meant to him that often in writing of land matters he uses imagery drawn from it. In "Drought" (Gifts of Fortune), describing the encroachment of a city's residential suburb into what had been a peaceful rural village, he notes that the slopes of the adjacent down hang over mason and carpenter like the solidified roller of the sea, a grove of trees riding its back like a raft. And in "A Devon Estuary," in the same volume, the seaside village of Burra becomes a part of a great ship:

This village, which stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about it today is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out from my port-light to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may be something in that legend of a great stone ship on an endless voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before, so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a celestial voyage, and God knows where.

But what of the voyages across the seas of the world? I cannot here do justice to them. I can hope only that what I give will sharpen curiosity so that the reader will seek to discover for himself Tomlinson's landfalls and horizons. An early voyage, his first he states, is described in "Off-Shore" (London River), the account of a voyage by steam trawler, the Windhover, to the cod fleet on the Dogger Bank in the days of the Russo-Japanese War. He tells of the almost futile search through several days of stormy, North Sea weather for the trawler fleet, which should have been found directly. Tomlinson was considered a Jonah, but this distinction did nothing to diminish his delight in the prospect of endless ocean upheaved and of leaden sky. The ship herself was for him as sentient a creature as any aboard her, when she pointed her stem to the clouds as she climbed a wave, or lifted her stern to let a mass of hissing gray water pass beneath her keel. Characteristic of the exactness of detail with which he can report what he has seen is the view of the Susie, a trawler his skipper hailed in his zig-zag search for the lost fleet: "I shall always see her at the moment when our skipper began to shout through his hands at her. She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her. Surge blotted her out amidships, and her streaming forefoot jutted clear. She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan of her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us."

Another voyage, the subject of "The African Coast" (Old Junk), took him from Algiers to Tripoli in Barbary on the cargo steamer Celestine, with an ebullient Frenchman as master. Again there was a storm—"the barometer, wherever I am, seems to know when I embark. It falls." There had been earlier on his trip from England to Algiers, sun bright glimpses of the land, but off Bougie, "That shining coast which occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat on the sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work of Iris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was the bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of granite under the wrack of the bleak north."

Years later he embarked by cargo ship for the Mediterranean again, this time with a grown son, whose first voyage, when he was a boy, Tomlinson described in "Initiation" (Old Junk). The voyage was a leisurely one, with halts at Casablanca, Gibraltar, Malta, Patras, Piraeus (where the ship sailed unexpectedly without them to its next port, while they were on the Acropolis), Istanbul, Ismir, and Alexandria. In his account are the description and reflection that we come to recognize as the hall marks of the man's work: "A mile to port a schooner was dim within the curtain of a cloud, but … a beam of [sunlight] found her, and she was radiant in an instant. She became more glorious than a ship ever is. As she heeled she flashed, as if giving out fire. She was signalling eternal renown to us."

The Sea and the Jungle and Tide Marks are his two major travel narratives. Concerned with his experiences on his first crossing of the Atlantic, the first covers a voyage from Wales to Brazil and two thousand miles up the Amazon and its tributary, the Madeira, to Port Velho at the San Antonio Falls. The trip was made in the Capella, a collier drawing twenty-three feet laden, carrying primarily a cargo of "patent" fuel for a railway construction project. The first part of the book is of the westward crossing—the sea. The ship, almost as soon as the pilot was dropped, was struck by a gale of steadily increasing velocity that, by the time she was out of the Bristol Channel, reached near hurricane force. Few writers that I know of have written so convincingly of the unrelenting fury of the sea as Tomlinson has written here, and I have not forgotten Conrad's power Typhoon. He concentrates his attention not so much on the damage inflicted by wind and weight of water as upon the Capella's dogged persistence fighting her way over each monstrous wave hurled against her. She was hurt once and almost overwhelmed when the cover of number three hatch came free. But there was finally relief, and the remainder of the crossing was under a hot sun and warm showers, through slowly surging tropic waters. There follows the second part, the arrival at Para and the long voyage up the rivers, with the Capella like a captive creature. Foliage brushed her rigging on occasion, and the fraying of her cable, when she anchored, through the friction of current-borne debris was a constant worry to the first mate. At Port Velho, Tomlinson took a trip further inland to the end of the railway construction and beyond. His breakneck return by mule and handcar to avoid missing the sailing of the ship is a nightmare of speed. To present the book thus summarily is, of course, to miss completely the subtle portraiture, descriptive power, and thoughtfulness that are its marrow.

Tide Marks carries the reader to Singapore and beyond to the island of Ternate in the Dutch East Indies, with stops at Borneo, Java, and Celebes. Returning to Singapore, Tomlinson then made an excursion into the Malayan jungle. This book, satisfying in its own way, lacks the lyric and meditative tone of its predecessor but it has brilliantly realized vignettes of the tropics, both marine and insular. Its high points are the scramble up Ternate's volcanic peak and the sojourn in the jungle with the affliction of ubiquitous and determined leeches.

In the foreword to the first illustrated edition (1930) of The Sea and the Jungle Tomlinson chides the original reviewers of the book for their failure to hear the accents of the author who stood in his immediate background, Thoreau. There and elsewhere his indebtedness is evident. Consider the following from "Some Hints for Those about to Travel" (Gifts of Fortune):

It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.

The attitude toward experience is the same in both men and both are keen observers of the world of nature. Tomlinson, however, takes the waters of the oceans of the world for his province and the great jungles of the New World and of the Malay Archipelago. Thoreau had only the narrowly circumscribed shores of Walden Pond and the New England wood lot and meadow. The movements of one for most of his life were within a ten-mile circle; the other has sailed the seven seas. Tomlinson, in "Log of a Voyage, 1935," writes of his son and himself: "Though we were in the same ship, the two of us must make separate voyages with varying experiences. We should share the same daylight, see the same landfalls at the same time, yet reality for each of us would be anything you like to name. The sea, ancient and changeless, could not reconcile us with its hint of continuity, the same yesterday, today, and for ever." The cabin of a ship at sea serves the same purpose as another man's hut beside Walden Pond.

Like Thoreau, Tomlinson decries the drift of the times. The former deplores the frenetic, and to him inconsequential, quality of the daily press; the latter is distressed that the umbilical cord of radio binds a ship at sea to the news of the world and to the land, so that even the master of a ship "is on a length of string, and an office boy in the owner's office often pulls it, to let him feel the brevity of his liberty." There is virtue in isolation. In The Sea and the Jungle he writes of his feeling in mid-Atlantic on the fortunately radioless Capella: "we confessed, with ease at the heart, and with minds in which nervous vibrations had ceased, that we must have reached the place that was nowhere, and that now time was not for us. We had escaped you all. We were free. There was not anything to engage us. There was nothing to do, and nobody who wanted us. Never before had I felt so still and conscious of myself." To him a ship's radio is but another example of a mechanization of life that can lead only to the merging of the individual difference in the dull gray mass of uniform humanity. This theme he develops in "Log of a Voyage, 1935":

From Shanghai to Istanbul, people are merging into a uniformity as featureless as the wooly flocks; as if we, too, were mass-produced, like our opiniohs, our habits, and our flats.… There is no excuse for sameness and flatness. It is a crime against the intelligence. Uniformity is the abortion of creation. It is not harmony, but monotony, like the drone of our engines, and numbs thought. It means the death of freedom of the mind, and so the end of the soul's adventure; the hopeful old story of our beginning in a garden will be empty of its purport, for the spirit will be frustrate, good and evil the same, and our eyes blind to the glory of the Lord, should it be revealed.

And again:

… it appears today as if there were but one good we all should respect, whether we want to or not: we must bow to the political use of power directed to full control of the lives of our fellows. The last aim of reason, therefore, is to refuse to human life the use of reason; so down we go to the uniformity of sheep. But will we go down? There is sure to be trouble about that. The individual soul forever, in London, and Pekin, and every Kaffir kraal, against all the assumptions of outside authority!

But I would not imply that his is only a derivative importance. There are echoes of Thoreau in his work, yet what he has felt is a reflection of his own individuality, and what he has seen has been viewed from his own angle of vision. And all of it has been set down in a style superbly and exactly molded to his purpose. He is a skilled craftsman of word and phrase.

Tomlinson has not received the serious and extended consideration that his work deserves. Collections of his earlier essays, as has been remarked, have been reprinted in recent years, and one of his pieces—"The Derelict" (Old Junk)—has strangely been included in Bennett Cerf and Henry C. Moriarity's An Anthology of Famous British Stories, although it is a narrative sketch rather than fiction. Little attention, however, has been paid either to his ideas or to his richly metaphoric prose. In part this neglect is undoubtedly due to the fact that much of what he has said so well as a critic of society has been included in his meticulous rendering of persons and places, of landscapes, seascapes, and personalities—in his travel essays, that is. Creative in quite a different sense from fiction, first rate travel literature nevertheless challenges critical insight.

Without question, it seems to me, he belongs to that noble fraternity of travellers among whom are found the James Boswell of A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, the Thoreau of A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers, the George Borrow of The Bible in Spain, the Charles Doughty of Arabia Deserta, the George Gissing of By the Ionian Sea, the Henry James of The American Scene, the Norman Douglas of Old Calabria, the D. H. Lawrence of Sea and Sardinia, the E. E. Cummings of Eimi. Of such as these Tomlinson may be said to write, and it can be written of him as well: "We borrow the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines."