This book has a lot of intrigue and a sense of adventure. Charles Hawes really has “adventure” going for his writing. I feel like I can’t use that word enough.
However… this issue here is the hovering sense of racism. Although our heroes are unwittingly tricked into partaking in the slave trade, and disapprove, their main foe is “the blacks”. And considering what the main characters are doing in Africa, it’s hard to view the Africans as much of a villain. Africans attack and kill and provide a sense of danger, but there’s no real moral security in who you want to triumph. The attacks were written well (adventure!) but I wasn’t really on the side of our “heroes”. It is played out so there’s blackmail and the narrator is young and just trying to protect his uncle, etc… but that doesn’t make one believe the Africans are in the wrong. There were indeed internal villains in the group, and that was much more satisfying.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It toes the line, but it’s a decent, yeah, adventure. ( )

One of five titles chosen - along with Cedric the Forester, The Windy Hill, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, and The Old Tobacco Shop - as a Newbery Honor Book in 1922, the first year the award was given out, The Great Quest is the first of two award-winning seafaring yarns from Charles Boardman Hawes, the second being the 1924 Newbery Medal winner, The Dark Frigate.

Opening in 1826, in the small New England village of Topham, it details the adventures of Josiah Woods, a young man who lives with, and works for, his Uncle Seth Upham, the local shopkeeper. When the strangely charismatic Cornelius Gleazen - Topham's disgraced prodigal son - returns to the home of his fathers, it soon becomes apparent that he has some sort of hold over Joe's brusque uncle, whose behavior becomes decidedly erratic. But although Joe observes his uncle with some concern, nothing prepares him for the revelation that Seth Upham had invested all his funds, everything that is to be Joe's inheritance, in a sea voyage to Africa. Setting out with his uncle, two of his uncle's assistants, Arnold Lamont and Simeon Muzzy, local farmer Abe Guptil, and Cornelius Gleazen himself, Joe is soon embarked on a dangerous journey that will take him from Boston to Havana, and thence to the coast of Guinea.

I began The Great Quest this past November (2009), reading online through books.google, as I was unable to obtain a copy through my library system, but although Hawes' story is not entirely without merit - some of his descriptive passages are quite atmospheric - I found it difficult to get through the book. In fact, I had all but abandoned it, until a snow day yesterday gave me the opportunity of finally finishing it. I'm happy to be done with it, to be frank, and don't really recommend it, unless you are (like me) determined to read the entire corpus of Newbery titles, both medal-winners and honor books.

Although Hawes is clearly not painting a positive portrait of the slave trade, or those who engaged in it - Cornelius Gleazen, Molly Matterson, Bud O'Hara, and all the others involved in this most detestable business, are clearly the villains of the piece - there is still a great deal of racism in the story, making it a rather ugly document of previous generations' idea of the world. As Joe and his companions - both friendly and hostile - flee across the African landscape, the language used to discuss their pursuers made me cringe. Joe considers the natives "superstitious" and ignorant, because they fear guns, but somehow also "cowardly," for attacking a smaller group. Reading along, I found myself thinking, "So they're cowardly for attacking a group possessing weapons they fear? Hmm..."

The "bad" guys make constant use of the term "n*gger," while the "good" guys may opt for the more polite "negro," but despite their differences, as Joe observes at one point, they all "at least" had white skin! I was conscious of an acute sense of disgust, while reading the second half of The Great Quest, a sensation that reached its zenith with Joe's analysis of black warfare, and the possible correlation this might have to the enslavement of Africans:

"I wonder if the whole performance to which we owed our lives was not characteristic of the natives of the African coast? If therein did not lie just the difference between a people so easily led into slavery and a people that never, whatever their weaknesses have been, have yielded to their oppressors? It all happened long ago, and it was my only acquaintance with black warfare; but surely we could never thus have thrown American Indians off the scent."

At this point in the narrative, having put up with "innocent" Americans being "accidentally" led into slaving voyages; having encountered "savage" blacks with a strange resentment of the European pillagers of their land, the murderers and enslavers of countless scores of their people; and having read this astonishing "blame the victim" explanation of slavery - lack of centralized organization is surely a sign that a people is more fit for slavery - I would have been very happy if the entire party HAD been caught by the natives. Sadly, it was not to be...

Spare yourself the grief, and skip The Great Quest. Unless you're a children's literature scholar, investigating the history of this particular kind of adventure-story for boys, or someone who is bound and determined to read all the Newbery books, you can definitely do without it! ( )