ABSTRACT
James Fenimore Cooper's development as a novelist during the last decade of his career falls into two sharply differentiated phases. The completion of the History of the Navy seems to have had a great liberating effect on his creative powers. The final phase of his literary career opened in 1843 with three very unromantic works, the disenchanted novels Wyandotté and The French Governess and the nautical memoir Ned Myers. From the time of Mercedes of Castile Cooper and his leading characters tend to regard the sea as par excellence the area of possibility: the area whose limits are unknown, where moral and physical dangers are most acute, and where the potential rewards and punishments are most prodigious. Mercedes of Castile is essentially a narrative of Columbus's first voyage to the New World on to which Cooper has soldered an absurd and puerile love story.
