Homeward Bound: Or, the Chase, a Tale of the Sea Volume 2

Homeward Bound, or The Chase is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 sea novel, working in the nautical fiction tradition that Cooper had been one of the founders of in American literature. The novel is the first half of a two book sequence, with the companion novel Home as Found published shortly after and continuing the story of the same characters after the sea voyage that Homeward Bound covers. The two novels together represent Cooper’s most extended late career engagement with the experience of returning American expatriates encountering their changing home country after years abroad.

The novel follows the Effingham family aboard the packet ship Montauk as they sail from England back to America. The Effinghams are a wealthy American family whose patriarch Edward Effingham had spent many years in Europe and who is now returning home with his daughter Eve and his cousin John. The voyage is interrupted by various complications including a chase by British naval vessels and other dramatic situations that the nautical adventure tradition required. Cooper uses the voyage as the framework for both the action plot and for the wider character interactions among the various passengers, with the closed shipboard environment providing the kind of social setting that allows extended character development across the page count.

Cooper had returned to the United States himself in 1833 after seven years of living in Europe, and the Effingham novels draw heavily on his own experience of encountering the changed American society he found upon his return. The political and social commentary that runs through Homeward Bound and Home as Found reflects Cooper’s increasingly critical view of the rapidly democratizing Jacksonian America that he was now living in, with his European experience having given him perspectives that made the American developments more visible than they might have been to readers who had never left the country.

Cooper’s nautical fiction was grounded in his own experience as a young naval officer in the United States Navy in the early 1800s, and his depictions of shipboard life, of the various technical aspects of nineteenth century sailing vessels, and of the wider maritime culture of the period draw on his actual professional knowledge. The chase plot that gives Homeward Bound its subtitle delivers the kind of nautical action sequences that his sea novels were known for.

Cooper’s prose is in the formal style of his time, which can take some getting used to. The political and social commentary is more directly stated in the late Effingham novels than in his earlier work, and modern readers will find his conservative framing more pronounced than they expected from the author of the Leatherstocking Tales. For Cooper completists, for students of nineteenth century American social fiction, or for readers interested in how American writers responded to the Jacksonian period, the Effingham novels are essential.