AllMovie

Wreck of the Hesperus was "suggested" by the poem of the same name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It will be recalled that the bulk of the Longfellow original was devoted to an impassioned dialogue between the captain of the ill-fated Hesperus and his daughter, whom he has lashed to a post to keep her from being washed overboard during an outsized storm at sea. The principal roles of Captain Slocum and his daughter Gale are enacted herein by Sam de Grasse and Virginia Bradford. To pad out the plotline to feature length, a romance has been added, with Gale falling in love with John Hazzard Jr. (Frank Marion), handsome and courageous son of the shipbuilder (Francis Ford) whose negligence causes the wreck. The property was remade by Columbia in 1948, again with a tacked-on love story.