Mr. O’Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad.  He knows the interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville’s Moby Dick and the first chapter of Typee—­best of all in Bullen’s Cruise of the Cachalot.  Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas—­perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper’s wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude.  The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay.  Against his iron determination his wife’s piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail to turn him home “with a measly four hundred barrel of ile” is the problem of the play.

J.A.  Ferguson:  CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR

This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688.  “The Young Pretender’s” vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England, might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection of the Highland chiefs who supported him.  His failure was completed at the bloody battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in 1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation.  Scott’s hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in Kidnapped, had numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts.  The hatred of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.

The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of course, the heroic characters in the play.  We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally.  It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king’s justice.  But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty.  We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous and bloody deeds!

This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1914.  The author has written no others which have been published, though he is credited with a good story or two.  It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent as this one.  He has put into very brief and effective form here the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless conflict.