A chance find on a charity stall of a battered copy of Whale Adventure recently bought it all back. This was first published in 1960, but my copy is the 1973 edition. Rereading it has reminded me of the importance of those early books, and my enjoyment of them. But it's also shown me some pitfalls of youthfull reading!
But Whale Adventure is very different to the ones I devoured. In Whale, Roger and Hal kill animals. They are on board the Killer, one of the last three masted whale hunting sailing ships. The ship is captained by the cruel Grindle who enjoys violence and torture of his crew. His consequent shortage of crew forces him to take the two boys (19 and 12) onboard, but he treats them with disdain for their "gent" like ways.
Willard Price liked, as many young peoples' books do, using his writing to educate as well as entertain. So there's plenty here about life and work on a whaleship - the sights, smells and violence. Both Hal and Roger get to kill whales, and there's a lot about how the animals are butchered in the old way, and later on the factory ships. Price also introduces a host of other animals, Killer Whales, sharks of various types and seabirds. The reader enjoys it, and learns. But what do they learn?
Leaving aside the implausibility of the story line, which features boys proving their value to experienced sailors, cruel captains, shipwreck and mutiny, the problem is with the information about the animals themselves. It is true that in the last 60 years since the books were written our knowledge of these animals has vastly grown. In Whale Adventure Price quotes a few recent studies to show that whales communicate - something that was clearly considered novel at the time. But the hunt itself is certainly not criticised, and his depictions of the animals, in particular the Killer Whales, is often widely inaccurate. For instance, whale spouts - the air they breath out - are repeatedly depicted as dangerously acidic. That's not true. Checking some of Price's assertions led me to this fascinating piece on how inaccurate young people's books (including non-fiction) actually are. Particularly pertinent to this story are the comments in this about Killer Whales, "In the span of a human lifetime, we’ve gone from fearing killer whales to seeing them as cuddly entertainers and then as intelligent animals that deserve our respect and protection."
Do these inaccuracies matter? Well I certainly know that Price's Adventure stories impacted on how I understood the world and animals in it. They were informative and encouraged me enjoy animals and want to preserve the "natural" world. But I still retain, likely inaccurate, knowledge from those books. As the article linked above points out:
In a 2016 article called, tellingly, “Cetacean Frustration,” four British scientists surveyed picture books that feature whales and other cetaceans. Of 116 books, 74 had errors. The rate was higher in fiction, but almost half of the nonfiction books also contained errors.
The problem is that children accept uncritically the information they read. Not least because:
So good information matters, especially for kids. In a 2002 article in the journal the Reading Teacher, science educator Diana C. Rice wrote it’s a mistake to assume that science misconceptions from early childhood will be corrected later. Rather, “research in science education suggests just the opposite, that we cannot assume that children’s ideas in science will become more sophisticated.” She cited a 1999 survey of American adults in which about half of the respondents believed that early humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, an idea, she wrote, derived from children’s books, movies, television, and—in some cases—religion.
In re-reading Willard Price, I've discovered that these books are actually not that great at developing children's understanding of the world - though most of them (where they don't kill) are actually desgined to foster a love of nature, animals and the world around us. Does this matter? Well all Price's Adventure books are currently available, with modern flashy covers. There are also, other, problems. For instance in the whole of Whale Adventure there are no female characters - not even in the background of the scene setting pages. I dread to think what Price's Cannibal Adventure might be like. Much as I loved them, perhaps these books should be left on the nostalgia shelves?
Related Reviews
Philbrick - In the Heart of the Sea
Wise - To Catch a Whale
Richards - The World Hunt: An Environmental History of the Commodification of Animals
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