Reading Captain Salt in Oz Aloud to My Son... and Two Years of Oz!

Captain Salt in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

With this book, my son and I move into Ruth Plumly Thompson's final four contributions to the "Famous Forty," none of which had color plates, and all of which have been republished by Books of Wonder in large paperbacks. I have to say, that even though a book with John R. Neill color plates is better than a book without them, it's much preferable to have his work reproduced at a larger size even when it is all black and white; the illustrations are so much more enjoyable to look at here than in the Del Rey and SeaWolf editions of the earlier Thompsons.

Originally published: 1936
Acquired: June 2022
Read aloud: June–July 2023

Though I know I read most or even all of the Thompson books as a kid, I typically have remembered nothing of them before rereading them to my son. But I did remember just one thing from this one: Ozamaland. I didn't remember anything about it, but I recognized that place name, and that as a kid it had tantalized me. What was this place that seemingly shared a name with Oz yet was so far from it?

Like the last few books by her, this has the feeling that Thompson is pushing out of the confines of the Oz structure and just doing what interests her. Specifically, this is a sequel to her own Pirates in Oz, following up on the adventures of Captain Samuel Salt of the Crescent Moon (formerly a pirate, now the Royal Explorer of Oz), ship's cook Ato (also part-time King of Octagon Isle), and Roger (Ato's Royal Read Bird). Together, the three (the Crescent Moon has been automated by the Red Jinn of Ev, so Salt need not rely on her unreliable former crew) set off to explore the unknown reaches of the Nonestic Ocean... and colonize it for Oz!?

Like a lot of Thompson's books, the politics are both pretty conservative and seemingly at odds with other Oz books. The book claims that Oz is getting too crowded—too many communities dotting the map, and too many princes who need places to rule—and thus the Crescent Moon is to bring new lands into Oz, putting them under the rule of Ozma. Whether these new lands want to be ruled appears to be somewhat besides the point, and the book reproduces a number of Orientalist tropes, portraying these lands as "new" and "undiscovered" even then they have their own inhabitants! But those people are, of course, just "natives."

There's not really another Oz book like it, though: none of the characters are from Oz, none step foot in the four countries of Oz during the novel's events, and no characters created by L. Frank Baum appear (which is I believe a first in the Oz books). The looser, aimless exploratory journey structure reminds me a bit of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), which was always my favorite of the Narnia books, and I found a lot to like here too. Thompson takes the Crescent Moon to a variety of new and interesting places: Lavaland Island with its volcanic inhabitants, Peakenspire Island made up entirely mountains and inhabited by yodelers, a giant sea forest, and so on. But like in Pirates, the novel benefits from the fact that being set on a ship means it can't have the frenetic pace of a lot of Thompson's Oz novels, with there actually being time to pause and reflect between each escapade. There's a lot of emphasis of the fauna that Samuel Salt collects, with lots of neat animals described and captured. Like in my favorite Oz novels, there are weird problems the characters must reason their way out of using their varied skills.

On one of their early trips, the Crescent Moon discovers in captivity on Patrippany Island, King Tazander Tazah of Ozamaland, who is being cared for by a friendly speaking hippopotamus named Nikobo. They liberate "Tandy" and bring him aboard, heading for Ozamaland, which Salt has heard of but no one has ever actually visited before. Tandy refers to himself as a "king and the son of a king's son" and is too proud to do any work aboard ship. But with some coaxing from Roger, he soon comes to enjoy sea life and learns to have fun. It's a fairly quick evolution, but it's also the only such evolution I can think of for an Oz protagonist, who usually end their novels much as they began. Tandy learns to be a better person, and when he returns to Ozamaland he is able to stand up for himself in a way he never did before—and unusually for a Thompson ruler, he just gets back on the Crescent Moon once the novel is over.

There's a very perceptive take on this novel I enjoyed from J. L. Bell hosted on Pumperdink; as he points out, it's basically Thompson's version of a Rudyard Kipling novel like Captains Courageous. But "[b]oth THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS are about learning the rules of a society--of the jungle or a ship. In contrast, Roger's approach to educating Tandy is to FREE him from the rules he's been following all his life." Tandy learns to be helpful on the ship, especially thanks to his artistic ability, where he quickly sketches nature scenes for Captain Salt's log. But also the ending is different too:

Can Tandy keep from growing up further? I think the young heroes of both THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS suffer through the death of one of their mentors, a major step toward maturity. Tandy doesn't have to do that. Though he lost his parents in infancy, he still has Nikobo, Salt, Ato, and Roger, and they seem to expect to live for hundreds more years. Thompson's version of Kipling's tales can thus have a uniquely Ozzy ending--a coming-of-age story in which no one actually has to come of age.

I think Bell encapsulates well why the arc of Tandy was one of my favorite parts of the book.

So if you can put the politics aside (and I can't blame you if you can't, because the story wouldn't exist without them), it's an enjoyable book. It seems to me with a little bit more self-awareness this could have all worked. Have Salt come to learn that though these places were all unknown to him, they weren't to their inhabitants, and have him realize that the Oz colonization plan was doomed. The set-up is right there, too, with the chapter about how Samuel Salt ends up a specimen in an underwater zoo, but it goes nowhere.

Like a lot of Thompson's work, it has the faint feel of being made up as she went along. Specifically, we are given a lot of details about Ozamaland early on that aren't really relevant to anything. It's on a continent called Tarara, sharing it with another country called Amaland; the people of Ozamaland wear white and are divided between the nobles who live in the White City and the "natives" who live in the jungles and deserts, while the people of Amaland wear gray. None of this matters in the end. One wonders if Thompson was setting up stuff she could use at the novel's end if the Crescent Moon made it to Ozamaland with fifty pages left to fill up, but then the Crescent Moon made it there with only twenty pages to fill up. I'd like to read a sequel that delved into all this a bit more—and why, as has tantalized me ever since I was a child, the name of the country has "Oz" in it. It seems to me there are some stories there. (There is a four-book fan series called The Royal Explorers of Oz that follows up on elements of this book, but I don't know if it explores what I am interested. Alas, at over $40 it's a bit of a plunge to take on the work of unknown-to-me authors.)

My son and I didn't move as quickly through this as our last couple, but he did seem pretty into it, especially the descriptions of many of the strange and unusual animals they encountered. When I asked him if he liked it, he said he liked all of the parts. (Unlike some other Oz books, there's not really any extended sequence of "bad things" happening to our protagonists, which is always what he complains about.) It was a good one to read aloud, though the early sections gave my throat quite a workout having to do a pirate voice, a pompous monarch voice, and a bird voice! I was very grateful when Tandy showed up.

(Many pedants like to point out that this book, despite the title, has no scenes set in Oz... but that's not true, because every island that the Crescent Moon visits is absorbed into Oz. Captain Salt is in Oz all the time!)

* * *

This book marks two years of reading Oz aloud to my son, who was not quite three when we started and is now not quite five. (I am writing this ten days before its posting date, which is a day before his birthday.) In the first year, we read an astounding twenty-three Oz books; this year we read sixteen more, which is not quite as fast but still pretty respectable. This covered books five through sixteen of Ruth Plumly Thompson's nineteen-book run, plus a four of Baum's "borderlands" books. All the Thompsons have essentially been new to me, so unlike the first year of this project, which was largely nostalgic, this has been one of discovery. I don't always like her choices, but almost all of them have been worth reading. The few borderlands books we did have been fun to revisit through a child's eyes; I have more appreciation of, say, Dot and Tot of Merryland and Queen Zixi of Ix now (though less for The Master Key and The Enchanted Island of Yew).

Though his interest ebbs and flows in its precise intensity, he seems as in to them as ever, and we have maintained a fairly consistent pace of late. The other day, he spent a morning drawing me a bunch of strange creatures that he said were from Oz, and indeed, they seemed pretty Ozzy.

It's funny; at this point his reading of the early books was so long ago he scarcely remembers them. Around the time we read Kabumpo in Oz, he told me that Dorothy, Ozma, Trot, and Betsy were his favorite characters; a month ago he did not remember who Trot and Betsy were! Once we get to the end we can go back to the beginning and it will all be new to him. I am looking forward to getting out of the Thompsons soon and discovering other flavors of post-Baum Oz, but I also know a lot of those books are more interested in the specific details of Baum which my son has totally forgotten!

Next up in sequence: Handy Mandy in Oz