Trader Dean

THE PEDRO GORINO--Captain Harry Dean--Houghton, Mifflin ($3.50).

The Story. In 1619 a Dutch ship named the Full Moon entered Saldanha Bay, Africa, for water. The old King of the Herreros went to the shore, though he was sick. To the King the Captain offered white man's medicine. All must drink. The King and his bodyguard agreed. Faithfully they drank the prescribed drink. It came in cases labeled HOLLAND GIN. After the warriors were quite senseless, 16 girls and four boys were kidnapped, to be sold as the first slaves at Jamestown, Va. Next morning the Dutchmen were far out and the Herreros could not chase them. . . .

Why could the Herreros not chase the Dutchmen? "Not a ship among them," explained Silas, the uncle of this book's author. "That has been the downfall of our race."

"They shall have ships," murmured Author Dean. . . .

Even at the age of twelve Harry Dean felt in a measure responsible for his race. His great-grandfather, Paul Cuffee, was the first Negro to petition an American legislature against slavery. Paul's shipbuilder-father, Sam, was Said Kafu back in the old country--North Africa. Harry felt like carrying on.

So when he was a man, in the '80s Harry Dean bought the schooner Pedro Gorino in Norway. For a while he traded, making money, saving it. Then one day he met a certain Portuguese official and was surprised to hear him say, after a little palaver: "I am offering you the vast territory of Portuguese East Africa including the city of Lorenco Marques for -L-50,000 sterling." The territory was cheap because it stood between English and Boers, who were having a war. Dean wanted to snap up the offer with the aid of the tycoons of his own race in the U. S. He would install power in the Pedro Gorino, transport U. S. Negroes back to Africa by the boatload. But his race brethren gave him no support.

Dean went to Pondo Land. There he met a person much maligned by African whites, King Segow Faku. Dean tried to persuade this King to build ships and schools of his own. Dean reconciled the King with his ancient enemies, the Pondo Mesis. Then Dean went to King Lerothodi and Queen Baring, of Basutoland. He wanted to link Segow Faku, the Pondo Mesis and the Basutos. There would be a renaissance of the old African culture and civilization. Dean asked U. S. Negroes to send builders, educators. News came that all the other African Kings were gathered at Cape Town to do homage to the Prince of Wales, present King of England. Dean went there, organized a private reception for the Kings. He got them to swear friendship, fealty, each to each, in a dozen dialects. Not only, however, did no help come from the U. S., but one night, soon after the reception, the warehouse containing Dean's whole fortune in ostrich feathers mysteriously burnt down. The feathers had not been insured. Dean's life work lay in the ruins.

The Significance. Are conservative Houghton, Mifflin Co. treading the trail blazed by Simon & Schuster, fad promoters, publishers of Trader Horn and Cradle of the Deep? Is the Pedro Gorino another dubious "autobiography"? Like Ethelreda Lewis, amanuensis for Horn, Captain Dean's "assistant writer," Sterling North, met his subject receptively, admiringly. It was in March 1928, that University of Chicago authorities introduced them. Harry Dean, like Trader Horn, was broke, peddling his talents. North was 20, a poet, storyteller, student; Dean was 63, face sun-golden, hair silver, head ringing with words of Horace, Casanova, Cellini, Dumas. He had long been an adventurer on the continent truly his race's for 16,000 years. How much dark embroidery he has put on his life story, it is impossible, and unimportant, to tell. It is a cracking good story.

As for Dean's life work, the Back-to-Africa idea is not new. Paul Cuffee returned twelve slaves to West Africa, and their Liberia, founded 1822, was the first great movement. Bishop H. M. Turner, until Booker Washington silenced him in the '90s, advocated all U. S. Negroes to follow. Captain Harry Dean's call, issued at the turn of the Century, did not reach the race in a broadcast manner and was even less successful than the short-lived Black Star Line of Jamaica's Marcus ("Black Moses") Garvey, who was deported from the U. S. last year. Back-to-Africa movements, implying escape as the answer to the assimilation v. segregation problem, are nowadays viewed with scorn by progressive U. S. Negroes.