My Son on the Galley

Translated into English for the first time, this cheerfully bawdy Swedish classic recalls Wallenberg's tenure as chaplain on the Swedish East India Company ship Finland , safeguarding the crews' souls from Sweden to the Cape of Good Hope and on to China between 1769 and 1771. Only 23 when he started the two-year journey, Wallenberg (his brother was a direct ancestor of the financial dynasty) was not above joining the lads for drinking bouts or mischief in the ports. Wallenberg's enthusiasms ebb and flow, eventually dissipating altogether after a few short chapters on Java and China, but his prose and verse descriptions of seaboard life are often priceless. One particularly delightful section deals with a well-lubricated seafaring literary society that had as its shield the inebriate/poet Johan Runius ``lying in a gutter while three ladies, visible in a window, are asking him to compose. Above them is inscribed the following motto: `Oh, what a pretty pattern! / One window with three slatterns.' '' Wallenberg is a decided Swedish chauvinist, preferring Swedish women and landscape to all others and showing a particular aversion to Catholics and Jutlanders. Considering how long the sailors are absent from home, readers shouldn't be surprised that the talk often turns to women and that the tenor of their conversation generally is about what one would expect of 18th-century sailors. (Aug.)