[In the following essay, Young describes Silas Crockett as somewhat romantic in tone but inspiring in its message.]

Follow the Maine Coast from Bath to Bar Harbor, from Casco Bay to Penobscot to Eastport, and you will find the background for Mary Ellen Chase's fine romantic story [Silas Crockett] of four generations of a seafaring family. You will find, too, the remnants of the Crocketts who made maritime history for a hundred years and who, like the family of Mary Peters, knew the coast before change was upon it, before the last sound of hammer and mallet closed the clipper-ship era and all the brave journeying of Yankee sailors around a world traversed by white sails.

In Silas Crockett, with whom this chronicle opens, there was bred that spirited love of the sea common to the early, pure-strained English families of New England's coastal towns. His grandfather, Captain Reuben Shaw, had fought pirates off the Guinea coast, turned privateer in 1775, followed the fur trade to Puget Sound, and tacked around Cape Horn to enter the lively competition for the new Cantonese trade. Likewise, for thirty years of his life, his father, James Crockett, had sailed as shipmaster to the uttermost ends of the world, returning with cargoes that turned the great house at Saturday's Cove into a kind of elegant repository for the artistic handiwork of half the globe—rugs from Persia, tapestries from China, East Indian perfumes and damask cloths, books from London stalls.

At 23 Silas was a ship's captain who had already experienced enough of his ancestors' exciting world to know that his life was forever bound up in the restless pacing of a quarterdeck. He was returning now from a record voyage in the Seven Seas to marry Solace Winship, and to carry her off with him on his next voyage. It was an uncommon thing to do in 1830, to take a woman into the pirate-ridden waters of the East, and Silas, at first, was struck through with misgivings as to the family's reaction to his proposal. But as he moved eastward through the fogless dawn and entered home waters he took courage from old, familiar sights. The bustle of activity that raised the skeletons of brigs and barques and schooners in every village port, the cries of riveters and shipwrights and framers and seamers excited him and filled him with a prideful courage in his ancestry and his calling that nothing could undo.

Solace's first voyage ended tragically with the loss of her first baby and froze her heart to Silas's passion for ships and the sea until one day in 1850, when the clipper ship Surprise was launched, something in her husband's proud face made her suddenly understand the nobility and dignity of the Crocketts' tradition of bold seamanship. This flash of comprehension left her able to endure more patiently the coming of her second child after Silas had sailed alone for Australia.

Their son was Nicholas, a Crockett through and through who took to the sea with incredible swiftness, married Deborah Parsons, and, in the face of her increasing impatience, stuck to the worn-out tradition of those who went down to the sea in sailing ships rather than in the incoming steamdriven craft. At 25 Nicholas lost his life at sea and left behind him Reuben, a less venturesome Crockett, but one, nevertheless, destined to carry on family tradition somewhat humbly by commanding a coastwise steamer that plied up and down the fog-swept stretch between Rockland and Mount Desert.

But by the time Reuben's son, Silas 2d, lay squirming in his crib in the decaying grandeur of the Crockett house, the second decade of the Nineteen Hundreds had changed the face of all Maine villages. Where the docks, the fisheries, the sawmills and shipyards had stood were rising the certain signs of the Summer colony—the country clubs, the fancy yachts, the antique shops. All that energetic industry that had fired the heart of the first Silas Crockett was going. The old houses were exchanging hands, and Summer residents had driven out all but a handful of the early families. Reuben Crockett, staring into the eyes of his dignified ancestors who peered down from the gilt-edged portraits, held on to the family homestead as long as he could. But the day comes when Reuben and his wife, Huldah, have stripped the house of sandwich glass and portraits and old china and all the fine pieces that brought ready cash. They are obliged to sell, and in the face of their disaster young Silas leaves college in the Spring of 1931 to take a job in the herring factory. When he goes with Ann, his future wife, to visit the old Crockett house and is denied entrance by the butler, the entire tragic decay of a great family and its tradition is implicit in this finely observed encounter.

Yet the book ends with Silas spiritually above reverses of fortune. He faces the future alive to the poise and dignity and roots of his heritage:

“Looking out from his eyes, standing firmly in the poise of his head, were unchangeable things—the daring of Amos and James, the humorous wisdom of Abigail, the steadfast devotion of Solace through years of fear, the faith of Silas and Nicholas hanging to fast-dying sail with the world against them, the secure and patient ways of Reuben, the unshaken and glorious reality of Huldah's love for God … the substance of all things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, the everlasting triumph over time and chance.”

Miss Chase is decidedly filled with longing and regret for the times that are no more. Her sympathy and perception are awakened by a thorough and long-standing knowledge of the dispirited towns of the Maine coast. In calling up their past, she is, perhaps, inclined to make their culture and traditions appear more desirable than they really were. Yet by an astonishing selection of quiet incident and descriptive detail she re-creates a vanished way of life that is tender and refreshing and inspiriting to the end—a life in which we want to believe. Clearly, she sees her deserted villages with the eyes of a Goldsmith rather than a Crabbe, and we come away from her strong, lovable characters with a sense of exultation that few people now writing can give. Her people manage to make a satisfactory pattern of life. They have courage and conviction and values that are timeless.

This book definitely extends Miss Chase's reputation. To my mind, it goes far deeper in interpreting the heroism of the past and the stubborn passion of seagoing families than did ever Mary Peters. With this novel she imposes order and peace and serenity out of the materials of the past, and she does so without any tricks of style, without false moves or devices. She has the gift of understanding disciplined by the gift of selection. With Silas Crockett she takes her place among the rarer talents of the present.