BOOK REVIEWS

Morten Hahn-Pedersen (éd.). Sjœklen 1995: increasingly fewer ports has been clear in Den• Arbog for Fiskeri- og Sofartsmuseet Saltvands- mark. One result of this trend is that Denmark's akvariet i Esbjerg. Esbjerg, DK: Fiskeri- og import and export trade has shifted steadily Sofartsmuseet Saltvandsakvariet i Esbjerg, 1996. westwards, in part because ports there are closer 160 pp., photographs, illustrations, tables, to the markets outside Denmark. Hahn-Pedersen figures, maps, references. DKr 198, hardback; predicts that in the future, only fourteen out of ISBN 87-87453-84-3. Denmark's ninety ports are likely to survive. These four articles all have a common In this, its eighth yearbook, the Fishery and Sea• theme, for they all focus on ports and their faring Museum in Esbjerg, Denmark follows tra• importance. In contrast, the fifth article — a ditional lines, publishing a collection of articles report of the results of a research project by where fisheries and maritime history intersect. Svend Tougaard, Nils Norgaard and Thyge However, in contrast to earlier editions, the Jensen — is devoted to the study of North Sea focus of Sjœklen 1995 is fairly narrow, with four seals and their behaviour. Among other things, of the five articles devoted to ports and trade. the researchers were able to judge the exact size In the lead article, Hanne Mathisen presents of the seal population in the Danish Waddensea. new evidence on trade between Denmark and Sjœklen 1995 should find a large market, as Norway in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen• it should appeal to both local historians and turies. With Norway rich in timber and Denmark international economic historians. Moreover, known for its production of iron, each country because it has close ties to the local business had comparative advantages which they utilized community, the museum in Esbjerg has been to gain from trade. In examining this relation• able to publish a yearbook with solid standards ship, Mathisen demonstrates that Scandinavia in and a nice layout. The Fishery and Seafaring the past has also been a common market. Museum in Esbjerg is therefore to be com• Mette Guldberg focuses on international mended for being able to publish so stimulating trade through an analysis of the customs records and impressive a yearbook on a regular basis. of Hjerting in 1763. Hjerting provided customs services for the market town of Varde, and Anders Martin Fon Guldberg analyses the port traffic in this area. Tonsberg, Norway The article demonstrates clearly how a small country could gain from both export and import Haskell Springer (ed.). America and the Sea: A trades. Denmark exported only twenty different Literary History. Athens: University of Georgia types of goods through Hjerting, while 200 types Press, 1995. xi + 414 pp., illustrations, bibli• of goods were imported, mostly from Holland ographies, index. US $40, cloth; ISBN 0-8203- and Denmark. 1651-2. Poul Holm ventures into local business his• tory. He describes and analyses the activities of In recent years, literary historians have become the shipbroking and insurance firms of Brinholt aware that histories which present a single per• and Christensens, active for three generations spective and attempt to unify a large body of between 1875 and 1953. Their success demon• literature into a single narrative can distort, strates both the ability and the requirements of omit, and repress writers and works that fail to small, flexible companies operating within the meet the historians' criteria for inclusion. In his shadow of major capital interests. attempt to encompass Anglo-American literary Morten Hahn-Pedersen focuses on Danish responses to the sea from the sixteenth century ports from 1960 to 1992. As in several other to the present, Haskell Springer grapples with countries, the tendency towards concentration on this problem by taking a non-traditional, demo-

75 76 The Northern Mariner cratic approach. He gathers thirteen writers who of their own. However, the book also moves present individual essays from a number of per• into areas uncharted until recently. Chapters on spectives and approaches. Often, the writers' genres not often covered in literary histories, discussions centre on the same works from dif• such as John Samson's "Personal Narratives, ferent perspectives, adding a sense of dialogue Journals and Diaries," and Robert Madison's to the history. Springer's range is broad, focus• "Hymns, Chanteys and Work Songs," provide ing on the role of the sea in American literature insights into the daily lives of officers and generally, not only on those genres narrowly sailors alike, particularly during the golden age defined as sea literature. This makes for a big of sail in the early nineteenth century. These book, full of useful information, well-researched sections add a sense of the everyday lives of overall, but lacking in scope in a few places. those who lived on the sea and reveal the Springer edited the volume to provide as sources for such as Edgar Allan Poe, Richard much thematic unity as possible. The articles are Henry Dana, Jr., Cooper and Melville. The arranged roughly chronologically, and unnecess• racial dimensions of America's sea history come ary repetitions have been excised. His intro• into focus in Elizabeth Schultz's extensive duction and extensive bibliography give the account of an African-American counter-tradi• impression of a whole. The fourteen chapters, tion. Schultz ranges over the entire period and presenting a wide range of approaches and opin• tracks the sea's importance for black writers, ions on various subjects related to the literature including Alaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, of the sea, are not restricted to the written word. Zora Neale Hurston and Charles Johnson. Start• Thus, the portfolio of "American Seascape Art" ing with the horrifying experiences of the offers black and white reproductions of import• Middle Passage, Schultz shows the gradual ant visual representations of the sea in American transformation of the sea into a resource through art, from a sea battle depicted in the background which recent black writers literally and symboli• of Thomas Smith's emblematic "Self-Portrait" cally explore their roots. (1670-1690) to Jackson Pollock's "Full Fathom As readers of American literature might Five" (1947). Roger Stein's commentary on each expect, Melville takes centre stage in the history piece in the portfolio impressively relates the and Moby-Dick provides its monumental fixture. artworks to the sea literature discussed in the Springer has collaborated with Douglas Robil- rest of the book, yet the works are interesting in lard on the Melville chapter, which gives a clear their own right. The connections Stein draws and concise account of Melville's fifty-year between art and literature broaden the scope of career as sailor, pilgrim, fictive voyager and the history impressively. poet of the sea. In fact, Melville's presence Such novel approaches to the literature will throughout the book gives the impression that be particularly refreshing and useful to readers America's literature of the sea might be sum• interested in American studies. From Donald P. marized as ante- and post-Melville. The chapters Wharton's essays on the colonial and early ante-Melville reveal works that influenced and federal periods, which establish the central place served as sources for his sea fiction and poetry. of the sea in the early life and developing Post-Melville writers from Jack London and ideology of the United States, to Robert Bert- Ernest Hemingway to Charles Olson and Peter hold's compendium of contemporary writers of Matthiessen have confronted Moby Dick, its sea fiction, such as Peter Benchley, John Barth, encyclopedic depths challenging subsequent Ursula K. Le Guin and Peter Matthiessen, the generations to dig into the novel for their own book ranges widely over American literature. purse of ambergris. Bert Bender's "Fiction by The bulk of the volume presents general Seamen After Melville" gives a glimpse of how accounts of historical periods, such as nine• pervasive Melville's influence has been from the teenth-century poetry and realism, and twentieth- mid-nineteenth century to the present. century poetry and prose. As well, the two Unfortunately, the articles are not all of the major figures in nineteenth-century American same quality. This unevenness is due partly to sea fiction, James Fenimore Cooper and Herman the choice of materials and partly to the scope Melville, receive individual attention in chapters of some of the chapters. The two chapters on Book Reviews 11 modern literature specifically, for instance, draw and lively vision of the importance of the sea to specious and narrow accounts of the symbolic the history of American literature. significance of the sea to writers such as H.D., William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot and Robert Marc Thackray Frost in poetry, and Willa Cather and F. Scott Comer Brook, Newfoundland Fitzgerald in prose. Some works of these writers that could be related to the literature of the sea Lars Scholl. Hans Bohrdt: Der Marinemaler des are not mentioned or even alluded to, leaving a Kaisers. Hamburg: Koehler, 1995. 120 pp., distorted impression of their place in the history. illustrations (b+w, colour), notes. DM 34, paper; As well, some of these canonical figures have ISBN 3-7822-0642-8. little relation to sea literature and take up space that would better be used to develop discussions This is the fourth publication issued by the of other writers. Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane DeutschesSchiffahrtsmuseuminBremerhavento and Charles Olson, for instance, all of whom be written by Lars Scholl. Here he presents a devoted large portions of their careers to sea- well-researched study of the German marine related works, get too little attention, and popu• painter Hans Bohrdt. For some years the lar sea fiction of the first half of the twentieth Museum has produced a number of special exhi• century goes virtually unmentioned. bitions devoted to the work of marine painters. One other minor aggravation results from In connection with the exhibitions, these artists Springer's general bibliography. Although nicely have each been the subject of a more extensive detailed and inclusive — the only omissions of monograph. This venture has led to many works note may irk Canadian music fans, as Gordon that were feared lost being instead traced and Lightfoot and Stan Rogers recordings mentioned found. in the text go uncited — the general lists of Bohrdt was born in Berlin in 1857 into a primary and secondary sources create difficulty comfortably well-off middle-class family. His given the number of different writers and the father was a civil servant in the legal department diversity of their subjects. If readers, for of the Imperial administration, and Bohrdt was instance, want to follow up on Madison's to become a bright star in that firmament of sources for sea chanteys, they have to wade marine painters that shone so brightly during the through the entire bibliography to dredge up Wilhelmine era. references to the songs mentioned in his chapter. Two world wars not only resulted in the Springer would have made source hunting easier decimation of Bohrdt's family but in the number and clearer if he had provided a list of selected of his works as well. Many are still unaccounted primary sources for individual chapters in for, including his best-known painting, "Der addition to the general bibliography. letzte Mann" (1915), which has been lost since America and the Sea offers many insights 1924. Innumerable reproductions, both cheap into the central place of the sea in American and more lavish, have been reproduced from this economic, social and cultural life. As history it work and it has been widely employed for brings to light the role of the sea in the develop• various political purposes. ment of the American nation. As sociology it of• In remembrance of the fiftieth anniversary fers intriguing discussions of nautical life over of his death in 1945, the Museum has arranged the last three hundred years. As literary criticism an exhibition of his work. In addition to those of it expands the horizons of American literature Bohrdt's paintings, posters, prints and repro• beyond the traditional coastline. Some readers ductions that it holds in its own collection, the may be confused by the murkiness of the penul• Museum gathered a number of works from both timate chapters, but the clarity and depth of the public and private sources. The aim of the rest of the volume should amply compensate for organizers was to provide as comprehensive a these minor inadequacies. Readers seeking a picture as possible of the last of the great marine unified narrative will be disappointed, but those painters. The technical virtuosity of this artist willing to let the writers's viewpoints resonate who so dearly loved ships and the sea is with each other will be rewarded by a complex revealed in all its forms, and considerable 78 The Northern Mariner attention is given to his skill as an illustrator. He younger Kaiser had purchased some of often used tempera for his illustrations, as this Bohrdt's paintings, both for his own private medium is particularly suited for reproduction as collection and for public buildings. Bohrdt a print, and he was able to hold his ground for became a painter à la mode, and was praised by a surprisingly long time against the remorseless no less a person than Adolf Rosenberg, the advance of photography and the camera. leading critic of the day, which lead to Bohrdt While many smaller nations could point to forming a personal friendship with the Kaiser a tradition of marine painting stretching back himself. He was showered with decorations and over a period of several hundred years, Germany in 1898 was awarded an honorary doctorate. By can only be said to have become seriously 1904 his work had begun to assume a somewhat engaged in this genre after the country became plodding predictability, and an art critic who had united in 1871. Marine painting was thus a earlier been benevolently inclined towards young form of art in Germany and somewhat Bohrdt now observed of one of his exhibitions oddly came to be cultivated principally in the that it "contained many paintings but little art." heartland of the country. For the Art Schools of His art had by now become a part of the propa• the inland cities of Karlsruhe, Dresden and ganda apparatus in a Germany resolved on Berlin, landscape painting provided the back• becoming a world power, and in which the bone of their curriculum. Nevertheless, the study Navy was but one of the essential elements. To of seascapes was included on their syllabus. quote Pompey, and probably Herr Professor Bohrdt was to a large extent an autodidact even Hans Bohrdt, "Navigate necesse est, vivere non." if, it is true, he had studied sporadically at the Apart from promoting the interests of the Navy Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. There he soon and the major shipping lines, his work was tired of drawing from plaster copies of more or established and appreciated amongst a wide less classical subjects, finding this way of circle of affluent buyers. As a member of the learning to be more of a hindrance than a help Imperial Yacht Club, he was able to exhibit his within his chosen field. work, and to obtain work as an illustrator for various Yearbooks. Marine painting imposes particular dem• ands; the individual components, the sky and the Until the outbreak of the war, artists had sea, the movement of the vessel, the setting and been given the opportunity to accompany the rig of the sails and so on, must be married to Fleet on its worldwide cruises and when security form a visual maximum. The smallest error by restrictions no longer allowed this, Bohrdt felt the artist would unmercifully unveil the dilet• that he had lost his connection with the sea. It tante. Hans Bohrdt was 15 years old when he was, he said, "like being a Red Indian in New saw the harbour in Hamburg for the first time. York." During the 1920s, the recovery of the The sight of vessels moored five abreast, made Merchant Marine ushered in new commissions him as he himself put it, a "marine painter." for the artist, but he never really managed to be During the decade prior to World War I, again in step with the spirit of the times. He the German Merchant Marine had grown to a died in Altersheim on 19 December 1945, 89 size only second to that of the United Kingdom. years of age. Not only the vessels themselves, proudly bearing With this book Hans U. Scholl has written three or four funnels, but even the cargoes and an excellent survey of the life of a marine artist the passenger, were depicted in order to publi• with all its triumphs and tribulations. The illus• cize the various shipping lines. Commissions trations do Bohrdt's work full justice, and the were not long in coming, but the outcome of the text and the historical context are particularly war resulted in the reduction of the merchant balanced and well-considered. The reader can fleet, the confiscation of ships and consequently only hope that this publication will lead to the no more commissions. All that remained, it discovery of more of the lost works of both this would seem, was for Bohrdt to be a painter of and other artists. nostalgic picture postcards. Bohrdt must have felt that fate had indeed Peter von Busch been most unkind, for during the 1880s the Karlskrona, Sweden Book Reviews 79

Patrick Villiers and Christian Pfister-Langanay ments and theoretical "battles" that opposed rival (eds.). Le Transmanche et Les Liaisons Mari• factions among French naval strategists. This times XVIir - XXe Siècle. Actes du colloque de text and other publications of Etienne Taillemite Boulogne-sur-Mer 1-3 avril 1993. Éditions concerning the pivotal period of the second half Revue du Nord, n° 9 hors série, collection of the nineteenth century are of critical import• Histoire; Villeneuve d'Ascq: Université Charles ance to an understanding not only of that par• de Gaulle-Lille III, 1995 [order from: Revue du ticular period but also of the twentieth century, Nord, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III, BP so dramatic for the European continent. 149,59 653 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex]. 248 pp., The second and third themes, crossing the tables, figures, illustrations, maps, photographs, Channel, thereby establishing links among English abstracts. 120 FFr (frais d'envois com• peoples, countries, and cultures, tend naturally to pris), paper; ISSN 0983-2327. merge to some extent in the papers presented, including the very interesting offerings of actors As Patrick Villiers explains in his excellent and observers of the various phases of trans- presentation of these proceedings, the directors channel transportation, communications and of this symposium attempted, quite successfully, other forms of relations studied here. For mari• to fit the texts of the participants into three time historians accustomed to studies of past general themes: invade, cross and link, or the centuries, especially of the final flowering of the Channel seen as an invasion route, as a body of magnificent eighteenth-century sailing ships, this water to be crossed, and as a link between the part of the book is probably the most innovative British Isles and the European continent, later and therefore the most interesting. between Europe and the rest of the world. The Channel has always been a highly fre• To have retraced all cross-Channel invasion quented, inescapable maritime route on Europe's attempts throughout the centuries would have Atlantic facade, and we are all acutely aware required several volumes, but the theme is illus• today that its maritime traffic has reached a trated here with several pertinent examples: point of near-saturation. Ships of all kinds and Patrick Villiers reconsiders the abortive Franco- of all nations ply its narrow waters and the ways Spanish attempt to invade England in 1779; and means by which this came about is well Christian Pfister-Langanay studies another form illustrated in a series of studies of great interest of "invasion" of the French coast by British to laymen. This term includes us all in varying smugglers at the end of the eighteenth century; degrees, for who can now claim to be an expert Christian Borde offers an innovative presentation in all areas of maritime transportation, trade, of French postal services between Calais and national and international regulations, to mention Dover from 1784 to 1855; Fernand Beaucour only a few aspects of the phenomenon as they provides an authoritative study of the role apply to this tight little body of water today? played by insufficient port facilities in Boulogne Major studies include Georges Oustric on and along France's northwestern coast in Napo• the evolution of Boulogne's port facilities in leon's unsuccessful attempt to invade Great the nineteenth century in a constant effort to Britain from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens accommodate steadily increasing trans-channel in 1803 to his decision in 1805 to turn French transportation; an interesting review by Jean land forces against coalition members on the Martin of river-and-Channel traffic between Continent; and Jean-Pierre Navailles gives a London and Paris from the end of the nineteenth provocative presentation of British anti-French, century to 1960; Guy Bataille's very interesting or anti-Napoléon, propaganda through the al• paper on the logistic support of the British front ready highly developed and very effective form in France during World War I; the study of the of satirical cartoons, a method of commentary in first ferries by Jean-Pierre Duteil; and the begin• which the British still excel. Last but certainly ning of rail links across the Channel, 1931 -1960, not least is the highly significant study by by Laurent Bonnaud. Etienne Taillemite of new developments in naval These excellent studies are completed by warfare at the end of the nineteenth century and sixty-three pages of texts due to six different the far-reaching results of the hesitations, experi• authors on subjects as detailed and as interesting 80 The Northern Mariner as Dunkerque's lightships, 1863-1989 by boden" 1836-1857, Tilburg University 1995). Georges Despin; Jacky Messiaen's work on the Another question to which much less atten• ferry-boat company ALA (Angleterre, Lorraine, tion has been paid is whether - not to mention Alsace); Yves Laisne's 1973-1993, the twenty how and precisely where — the other so-called years of Brittany Ferries; a particularly interest• "pre-industrial" modes of transport such as ing study of trans-channel Hovercraft by Gilbert rivers, canals and coastal shipping were able to Florent; Pierre Sinquin's analysis of the pro• modernize and adapt to industrial development, gressive measures taken to improve safety con• and by the end of the nineteenth century even ditions of navigation in the Pas de Calais, 1967- reappear as a challenger to the railways. By 1992; and Denis Guyot-Sionnest's study of cer• examining the history of inland navigation in tain little-known episodes of the history of the industrializing Europe, this collection of papers Channel tunnel, 1975-1995. These papers are and commentaries from an international confer• particularly interesting because the authors were ence at the Mainz Institute of European History often actors, always careful observers due to in September 1993 offers an international com• their own profession, of the events they have parison of recent research on European inland chosen to study. waterways transport under the impact of indus• This is very interesting, ground-breaking trialization during the nineteenth century. Of work on one of the most important and densely course, not all countries or regions could be travelled straits in the world. The whole story of treated in just one volume. Nevertheless, an the Channel cannot be told in one volume, but attempt is made to cover most of Europe. this is an excellent start to the study of history- Which new insights did the seventeen making, obligatory passages that have deter• specialists in transport history from eleven mined the course of maritime power and countries reach? Generally, in the first half of consequently of its history throughout the ages. the nineteenth century, the building boom in canals that began in the eighteenth century Ulane Bonnel continued in most European countries. In the Paris, France second half of the nineteenth century, increased competition from railways led to a sharp and Andreas Kunz and John Armstrong (eds.). prolonged crisis in river and canal traffic. Fur• Inland Navigation and Economic Development thermore, as many of the authors show, the in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Mainz: Verlag timing, intensity and impact of that crisis varied Philipp von Zabem, 1995. xii + 330 pp., tables, from country to country and from one region to figures, maps, select bibliography, contributors, the next. Thus, industrialization and railway index. DM 58, paper; ISBN 3-8053-1730-1. building in Great Britain led to a marked decline in waterway transport, whereas inland navigation Transport naturally played a very important role continued playing a crucial role in Belgium and in what is still commonly referred to as the Holland, particularly as a mover of bulk com• "Industrial Revolution" but which many now modities. Where industrialization occurred early, view as the culmination of an evolutionary as in Germany and northern France, the existing process that swept through Europe during the infrastructure was modernized sufficiently to nineteenth century following its take-off in overcome the challenge posed by the railways. eighteenth-century Britain. Steam-powered In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century one railways have commonly been seen as a revol• could conclude that a distinct revival of canals utionary transport system, one that added wel• and canalized rivers was taking place. Only in come speed and new transport lines to the Spain, which, from the viewpoint of the eight• traditional ones of rivers and canals. Until the eenth-century transport revolution was truly era of motoring, the contribution of roads to the Europe's Cinderella, the prevalence of primary process of industrialization was generally rather commodities greatly diminished the impact of insignificant, a point made most recently by canals. There one can say that canal technology Agnes Lewe about the Netherlands and Prussia was not able to bridge the gap between back• in her interesting thesis ("Invoer te lande ver- wardness and modem economic growth. Book Reviews 81

Some articles illustrate the many difficulties ized navy; there were five Admiralties for the of measuring the impact and river transport on coastal provinces, reporting under the States a regional or national economy, although all of General.) The collection itself was begun in the chapters that pursue quantitative goals should 1817, then gradually transferred between 1883 not be seen as being anything other than the first and 1899 to the Dutch Museum of Art, which pieces to a complex mosaic that is still far from was then a department of the new Rijksmuseum being complete. To judge more clearly what in Amsterdam. In 1927 the collection went into exactly was the overall contribution of the storage until about 1984, when it was found to waterways to economic growth during Europe's be scattered, in poor shape and very poorly doc• industrialization, we need much more reliable umented. Fortunately, it was possible to trace statistical information concerning such things as much of the original documentation through ex• size of fleets, length and tonnage of waterways, tensive research and to reassemble the collection density of traffic, volume, type and value of under one roof, thereby restoring a valuable goods shipped than is presented here. Not until collection. such time-series (which ideally should extend The Multimedia Catalogue of the Dutch back as far as the eighteenth century and should Navy Collection is a catalogue of approximately offer national aggregates) are available, will we sixteen hundred immensely varied artifacts in be able to see more clearly the different links what may best be described as an eclectic between waterborne transport and economic collection of maritime items that, together, growth in nineteenth-century Europe. As it was, present a fascinating look at a period of innova• in Inland Navigation and Economic Develop• tive technological endeavour in the maritime ment in Nineteenth-Century Europe, I sometimes field. The collection reflects both Dutch and encountered problems of orientation with all the foreign technological development, with artifacts local and regional data and figures. from different parts of the world, including Apart from these minor criticisms, this England. The collection contains many navy well-written and valuable book is an important ship models, half-models, ironclad rams, moni• step towards that goal. tors, merchant ships, fishing vessels and pleasure craft. It also contains a large collection of tech• J.F.E. Biasing nical models from the nineteenth century, in• Tilburg, The Netherlands cluding industrial, technical and scientific devel• opment models of dry docks, camels, dry dock Alan Lemmers (ed.). Maritime Technology from equipment, merchant shipping, bridges, steam the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: Multimedia Cata•engines (including locomotive) lighthouses, logue of the Dutch Navy Model Collection, artillery, naval guns on slides, tools such as 1698-1889. Lisse, The Netherlands: MMF early ships curves for laying out frames (1827), Publications, 1995 [order from: MMF Publica• patent rudders, detailed models of various rigs tions, Heereweg 331a, P.O. Box 287, 2160 AG and spars, and a submarine from 1835-40, along Lisse, The Netherlands]. CD-ROM with text, with items such as boxed sets of wood samples video (recommended system requirements: 486- from Surinam and Australia, samples of rigging, processor, 8 MB RAM, video card SVGA [800x including rawhide rudder control lines, etc. 600x256 minimum], Windows 3.1 or higher, Many models are cutaways or working models MS-DOS 5.1 or higher, 5 MB free space on that were sometimes used as patent models. hard disk, sound card [optional]. / 300 Others were used to demonstrate or clarify an (Libraries/institutions, one work station); / 600 idea or design principle to people such as the (Libraries/institutions, network). Naval Secretary. Another portion of the collec• tion contains memorabilia and art objects. When I agreed to review this CD-ROM, my Supported with well-researched archival and initial assumption was that it would contain a source documentation, the models provide a detailed study of models of ships used in the fascinating look into the creative processes at Dutch navies spanning the period 1698 to 1889. work at the time they were built, documenting (Prior to 1795 Holland did not have one central• technological history in the Netherlands to the 82 The Northern Mariner point where many historical assumptions may historical information available. References to have to be reconsidered. literature, archives, technical drawings, models Canada is represented with two models of and iconography are also given, along with a Columbus, a 301-foot timber raft (ship?) built at black and white photograph taken on a white Québec by Charles Wood in 1824 to be sailed to background. The text can be removed and the London, unloaded, then dismantled for her tim• small, single photograph of each item enlarged ber. Crudely built and intended only for a profit• for better viewing. An on-screen menu bar able, one-way-trip, Wood sent her back for allows easy movement around the catalogue. A another load. She was lost on the return trip to gallery selection allows viewing sixteen items at Canada. The first model of Columbus is a one time, while the slide-show choice allows framed hull-section, built post-and-beam style on viewing the entire catalogue on an adjustable a flat base, which extends beyond the vertical timed, on-screen basis. Where indicated, plans sides of the hull. The second model represents a of ships mentioned are available from the Neth• crudely built, high-sided box-like hull with a erlands Maritime Museum (Nederlands Scheep- very rudimentary bow, fitted with two deck• vaartmuseum) in Amsterdam. Many are avail• houses and just enough equipment to get her to able on microfiche from MMF Publications. London. She is shown with three masts, though The catalogue is available in CD-ROM and the catalogue lists her as having four. Her book form (scheduled for release in late 1995 by sailing qualities surely left much to be desired! Press of Sail, an imprint of Jean Boudriot Publi• The CD-ROM was initially reviewed on a cations) though apparently only as a set. (I only computer equipped with a 386 processor chip. reviewed the CD-ROM). Why the publisher This met the minimum recommended require• would not unbundle the set, making it available ments (though it was slow), allowing exploration to both the computer and/or conventional of the catalogue and its varied functions. A library-based researcher, is a puzzle. As distrib• computer with a 486-processor proved to be uted, one wonders what purpose the second ver• much faster and a better choice. The well- sion serves. While likely cost-based, the choice designed programming provides excellent index of black-and-white photography in an age where and search capabilities, including the ability to virtually any computers capable of running this cross-reference data and text using hyperlinks program would have colour capability is also and the ability to record information on a note• puzzling. The use of coloured photos would pad for future reference. One search problem, have added significantly to the presentation. noted in the documentation, is that since text is Those minor concerns aside, the CD provides an available in Dutch and English, identically excellent look at a fascinating collection. spelled words can have different meanings, Intended both as a museum and a collection though all information found in a search would catalogue, with its primary audience being the be presented, with the researcher sorting what museum-oriented public and other museums, it was applicable. is considered to be eighty per cent complete and There are three main parts to the catalogue: continuing. An eleven-page introduction docu• the catalogued artifacts; a comprehensive index; ments the catalogue, its history and the logistical and a forty-two page bibliography. The index choices made, along with the reasons for those contains a simple description, with each entry choices. This will be most useful to those con• assigned a unique catalogue number. Any item templating a similar project. The publication of can be viewed by entering the item number the catalogue at this time was undertaken to desired. Each item in the catalogue can be encourage similar projects, and is intended to viewed on-screen with detailed information in• stimulate and initiate similar activities. The cluding the catalogue number, general title, catalogue is recommended to those considering name, place and date, type of model, materials such projects, and to those interested in Dutch used in its construction (these are only shown in maritime and technological history. the basic context, i.e. wood, textiles, etc.) dim• ensions and scale. The accompanying text pro• N.R. Cole vides an object description, its history, and any Scarborough, Ontario Book Reviews 83

B.J. Clemons. Wake of the Wirelessman. Palo volunteered his wireless services and was im• Alto, CA: Glencannon Press, 1996. xvii + 266 mediately assigned to the ageing, French-built, pp., photographs, illustrations, maps, appendix, ex-cableship SS Vigo/KMC, laden with war sup• bibliography, index. US $16.95, paper; ISBN 0- plies and bound for Italy. The well-documented 9637586-6-7. account of Vigo's voyage from New York to Genoa via Horta and Gibraltar is a stirring This is the intriguing story of Dale Clemons and account of radio communications on the high his inestimable contribution in pioneering both seas in 1917, with details of seafaring and the radio and wireless telegraphic communication in radio profession on the war-ravaged North the US merchant navy early in this century. It Atlantic and such shipboard experiences as a was written by his daughter, a retired nurse, who major storm, contaminated drinking water, turned her attention to her father's seafaring disguising the ship by painting out her name and career when she found his old letters and photo• replacing it with the identification SF-11, install• graphs. These reawakened her love of ships and ing mock-up wooden guns, rigging sails on the sea lore, as well as the lingering curiosity of her foremast, a grounding and a leaking hull. father's unbounding interest in radio and the sea. After signing off Vigo, Dale married and As a farmboy in Iowa, Dale Clemons spent "swallowed the anchor." He built and operated his spare time visiting the local railway telegra• radio station WRBC in Valparaiso, Indiana; phist, and though he lived a thousand miles from later, as a licensed electrical engineer, he the ocean, he read voraciously about the sea and worked in Chicago where many of his electronic about Marconi's great new invention, wireless developments were granted patents. His interest radio communications and signalling through the in Amateur Radio lasted the rest of his life until, medium of Morse Code. in April 1968, he became a Silent Key. The Titanic disaster had an enduring impact Bette Clemons has written an engrossing on his life and it was about this time that he account about her resourceful father, the intrepid entered Radio School — the first radio school in "Sparks," and other adventuresome young pion• America — from which he graduated with his eers who blazed the trail of early wireless that government certificate of proficiency. He found began with Guglielmo Marconi. This attractive temporary employment in ships that plied the and very readable book is a worthy contribution US West Coast, and before long was assigned to to maritime history and should have excellent a position as "Sparks" on the passenger liner worth to those who purchase it. Congress. While serving in this fascinating ship, he honed his skills with a fast, accurate, fist and R.F. Latimer perfected his ability to copy Morse in the "copy Dartmouth, Nova Scotia behind" mode (holding the incoming word while copying the previous words). His life-long John King Fairbank, Martha Henderson dream of becoming an outstanding pioneer in Coolidge, and Richard J. Smith. H.B. Morse, what was then the new and exciting field of Customs Commissioner and Historian of China. marine radio communications was fast becoming Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. a reality. xiv + 314 pp., end-maps, photographs, appen• His next ship, SS Coluso, voyaged to Aus• dices, notes, bibliography, index. US $39.95, tralia and New Zealand, returning to Boston via cloth; ISBN 0-8131-1934-0. the recently opened, awe-inspiring, Panama Canal. A temporary mud slide at the canal com• Any historian who at any stage of his or her pelled Coluso to return to the Pacific west coast career has become involved in the China trade via Cape Horn. Then Clemons served on Lur- or the imperialist deconstruction of China after line, voyaging to Hawaii. World War I brought the First Opium War will sooner rather than into perspective the effectiveness of wireless as later have met Hosea Ballou Morse ( 1855-1934), a tool and weapon. When the United States Harvard graduate, long-time official of the entered the conflict after Germany declared Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, unrestricted submarine warfare, Dale Clemons and historian. His three major works, The Guilds 84 The Northern Mariner

of China, The International Relations of China, clear that they regard Morse as one of the most and The Chronicles of the East India Company successful of Sir Hobart Hart's assistants in Trading to China, remain an indispensable part administering the Imperial Chinese Customs of the intellectual challenge to the subjects Commission. There is ample evidence of his described in his titles. I think that I can write on astuteness in handling both routine administra• behalf of many colleagues, indeed, when I ack• tion and extraordinary situations, such as the nowledge my own academic debt to Morse for short-lived power vacuum on Formosa after providing me with a firm starting point from China's defeat by Japan. An interesting chapter, which to launch my own investigations into which has benefited from Chi-Kong Lai's China's economic and political relations with the expertise, deals with his frustrating secondment outside world since the beginnings of the so- to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Com• called Canton System. This book is a sympath• pany. After his retirement from the service in etic biography. Fairbank, for so long the doyen 1909, his academic career — although not based of Chinese studies at Harvard, began his career on any university appointment (his wife seems now over sixty years ago as an acolyte of to have vetoed their settling at Oxford) — was Morse. In turn, he became the patron of a large one of lasting achievement and recognition. school of scholars, including the co-authors of Indeed, his greatest personal satisfaction resided this biography. Fairbank had completed a fair is his being awarded an honorary doctoral part of the manuscript at the time of his death in degree by his alma mater, Harvard, even if by 1991, and it is a tribute to the academic loyalty that stage he lived in England and had left and inspiration he instilled as well as to the America behind him. influence of the intellectual and personal debt he The authors follow Morse's career closely was repaying with this biography, that his work and judiciously evaluate his contribution to both was finished in this dedicated manner by Cool- the Imperial Customs and the western historio• idge and Smith. Even if the "Fairbank school" graphy about China. Particularly in relation to has increasingly come under fire from more the latter issue, the account often assumes an recent historians who had absolutely none of his intensely personal character which is deeply historical and ideological roots, there can be no engrossing but which also has some controver• doubt that Fairbank remains a historiographical sial aspects in so far as a quasi-feudal loyalty to presence of great significance. Very much the Harvard seems to permeate both Morse's out• same may still be said about Morse, despite his look as well as that of his biographers. One strong late-Rankian and Orientalist tendencies. example may illustrate that another more critical This book is a classic biography in the good dimension could have been added to the biogra• sense. It is based on a voluminous amount of phy. In a book review published in 1907 Morse personal, semiofficial and official correspon• wrote that, contrary to the contemporary ortho• dence, and reconstructs Morse's professional doxy, the term Opium War "is perfectly legit• work in a solid and satisfactory way. His per• imate for a pamphleteer or a politician but not sonal life (as far as it can be retraced) is brought for an historian and a lawyer." This assertion is into the equation at every stage. This gives an neither discussed and explained nor assessed in all the more interesting dimension to what al• the view of Morse's actions as a Customs ready is an intriguing career, as his wife gave all official to facilitate the importation of opium the impressions of possessing a most domineer• into China at a moment when the drug trade had ing personality and, having witnessed an alarm• already distinctly become controversial. More ing anti-foreign uprising, had a profoundly anti- problematic from the viewpoint of placing Chinese disposition. Coupled with a number of Morse in his full historical context is that neither postings in "the boondocks," it is not surprising the Open Door Notes and subsequent US foreign that questions are raised about Morse's relation• policy towards China — which many historians ship with his wife on the one hand and his com• see as being directly inspired by the Imperial mitment to his career in China on the other. The Customs Service outlook and personnel (Hippis- authors confront these questions as well as the ley) — nor the growth and development of sources allow them to do that. They make it China's overseas trade and shipping are dis- Book Reviews 85

cussed. Particularly maritime historians will be sionary should devote so little attention to the somewhat disappointed that the focus of this diseases, injuries and medical emergencies he otherwise highly interesting and, also as an assuredly encountered, and so much to the ser• example of its genre, successful biography has vices of Divine worship he organized or in remained too narrowly directed on the details of which he participated. Indeed, at the end, we Morse's professional life. Nevertheless, many probably know more of the texts of the sermons will find much of historical and also personal he preached than of the medical conditions he interest in this book. Reading it is like finally treated. We must, however, remember the audi• meeting a person with whom one has conducted ence for whom he wrote and the extreme prob• a long correspondence — which can only mean ability that they would be far more interested in that, as far as recreating the subject of their tales of the wildly exotic northern world into biography is concerned, the authors have been which he had entered than in technical details successful. What the Chinese verdict about his that were better reserved to official reports. work is, remains to be seen. In any event, we should be pleased that he chose to convey to his distant kinfolk his own Frank Broeze fascination with the natural wonders of the Lab• Nedlands, Western Australia rador, including the great islands of ice replete with minarets and towers, flashing brilliant Ronald Rompkey (ed.). Labrador Odyssey: The white in the sunlight while underwater shelves Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the and ledges reflected the clearest starch blue and Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893. the loveliest emerald green. More especially we Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's Univer• should be pleased that he devoted so much of sity Press, 1996. xxxix + 231 pp., map, figures, his journal to his observations of the people and photographs, appendix, notes, index. $29.95, their struggles to survive in the face of heavy cloth; ISBN 0-7735-1366-3. odds, both environmental and economic. In particular, it would appear he was aston• To all those Newfoundlanders and Labradorians ished by the quality of the housing of the coastal who yearn for "the good old days" and a myth- settlers, even those who were comparatively ologized past that never was, this excellent book thriving, and describes in some detail the small should be required reading. For here, in cool log structures with sod covered roofs whose and lucid prose, we have a reality check: the single rooms served all the domestic require• first-hand observations of a young and intelli• ments of whole families. But though the cases gent man of science, that, while not devoid of he offers of profound poverty amounting to near sensibility, seem nonetheless dispassionate. For nakedness and starvation would extract tears Curwen does not write to promote sales nor yet from a stone, he does not write to invite pathos, to raise funds to further a cause. Rather, he nor is his attitude towards the people he des• seeks to share his experiences, his perceptions cribes at all condescending. Indeed, though he and his feelings with members of his immediate discovers the occasional villain, he appears, on family. balance to like the Labradorians he encounters. It is true that the point of vantage from His attitude to Newfoundlanders — par• which he observes a little of politics and society ticularly those who constitute the summer "float• in St. John's and somewhat more of life and er" population - is quite different. He is, of labour on the coast of Labrador is that of a well- course appalled by the sordid living conditions educated high Victorian with an evangelical turn on board the fishing schooners and is particular• of mind. Yet neither his own socio-cultural con• ly concerned for the young women who are ditioning nor his religion is an intrusive or hired for a pittance to toil among the fishermen. distorting element in his narrative. Indeed, the But his chief complaint is that the men are journal seems as candid as are the splendid pho• taciturn, unfriendly, and unthankful for the tographs scattered liberally throughout the text. benefits, whether spiritual or material, that he is Perhaps one may be a little surprised that a prepared to confer upon them. He is astonished recently qualified doctor who is a medical mis• that they respond dumbly to his friendly "What 86 The Northern Mariner cheer! my old skipper," and is even more biology, ex-Soviet resource exploration and amazed that when the Newfoundland "stationers " development, specialized gear technology and leave in the fall, they take with them the win• the application to deep-water resources of dows of their tilts so that, he says, the wind conventional fisheries science. This Workshop's blowing through in the spring will quickly melt proceedings have now appeared as the book out the winter's accumulation of ice and snow. under review. It is among the population of "floating" Published information in this field is so Newfoundlanders that he also finds his greatest scarce and scattered that any new work is villains: some who corrupt morals by selling important to specialists. This book is no excep• contraband spirits to the coastal people, but, tion, though it suffers from the usual deficien• more particularly those who practice barratry cies of proceedings volumes: it contains ideas almost as a way of life. taken to the Workshop, not the ones generated Curwen's journal on its own would make there, while the papers are a series of discon• this a worthwhile book. However, it is admirab• nected views, not a rounded exposition. More ly supplemented by extracts of reports and seriously, aside from an important paper by letters by Grenfell himself and by other mem• Clark on New Zealand orange roughy, the book bers of the expedition. Additionally, Professor is confined to a North Atlantic focus. It thus Rompkey has provided a most excellent Intro• misses most of the world's deep fisheries and duction. Indeed, we owe Rompkey a great debt many of the ideas they have generated. Even for of gratitude for making available to us this the North Atlantic it is far from complete. The valuable addition to the relatively sparse litera• most important fishery below 500 metres (the ture on the social history of Labrador. book's definition of "deep water") in this ocean is probably halibut longlining, which began Leslie Harris exploiting grounds down to 900 metres from St. John's, Newfoundland Georges Bank to Flemish Cap in the 1870s and which continues doing so to this day. Surprising• Alan G. Hopper (ed.). Deep-Water Fisheries of ly, it is never mentioned in this book, not even the North Atlantic Oceanic Slope. Dordrecht, in a list of Canadian deep-water fisheries con• Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, tributed by Ottawa's Duthie and Marsden. Some 1995. xii + 421 pp., figures, maps, tables, lesser finfish fisheries are similarly ignored photographs. / 295, US $199, £129, hardback; while there is almost no mention of shellfish at ISBN 0-7923-3511-2. all, despite the potential of deep-water crusta• cean resources. The book does not offer the bibliography of deep-water fisheries which is The world's great fisheries are all pursued either sorely needed. in water shallower than 200 metres or else near the surface of the deep oceans. This is no acci• Much of the contributed material also falls dent; marine production is largely confined to short of professional standards, with crude the sunlit layers where plants can flourish. In the computer-generated graphics mingling with later twentieth century, however, demand for preliminary accounts of initial research trials. fish has out-stripped traditional supplies and we This is the proper stuff of workshops but, have had to look elsewhere, including down the among fisheries scientists at least, it is usually continental slopes into greater depths. Expansion left in the decent obscurity of photocopied into that environment has created new complica• reports and documents while better-refined tions for the industry and its management, study papers are worked up for publication in hard of which has been scattered, both geographically covers. This book would have benefited if its and among disciplines. editor had demanded such additional effort from In 1994, a NATO Advanced Research the authors. Workshop was convened to draw together this Fully a quarter of it is taken up by two varied experience. It was an important gathering, workmanlike reviews of literature on, respective• providing the first opportunity to inter-weave ly, roundnose grenadier and Greenland halibut such disparate fields as academic deep-sea (known locally as "turbot"), prepared by Atkin- Book Reviews 87

son, Bowering and Brodie of St. John's. The Allen P. McCartney (ed.). Hunting the Largest second of these provides interesting background Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic to the 1995 "war" with Spain. Jutta and Jakob and Subarctic. Edmonton: The Canadian Cir- Magnusson provide a summary of the deep- cumpolar Institute, University of Alberta, 1995. water resources around Iceland while Reinert xi + 345 pp., figures, tables, illustrations, photo• gives an account of those near the Faroes. An graphs, maps. $28, paper; ISBN 0-919058-95-7. over-view of the Soviet explorations, which started the modern deep-water fisheries with This is a collection of sixteen papers presented surveys off Canada in 1963, is contributed by at a symposium on native whaling traditions in Troyanovsky and Lisovsky. The more recent and the western Arctic and Subarctic held in April less-developed Spanish, French and Irish deep- 1993 at the Alaska Anthropological Association water fisheries are covered in short papers. meeting in Anchorage. The papers provide a The deep-sea biologists Gordon, Merrett variety of perspectives on whales and whaling and Haedrich attempt to address applied fish• by residents of Alaska or Western Canadian eries issues outside their own, often-introspective Arctic coastal regions. They highlight past and sub-specialization. That is notable progress, present whaling practices, including reference to though they do not advance the debate beyond the belief systems which support them. the point reached in Australia ten years ago. The papers illustrate several underlying Bergstad contributes a review of fish ageing themes, including that native whaling is a living methods that says little new but does at least say tradition in northwest Alaska as a cooperative it to those interested in deep-living species. venture between men and women undertaking Hareide and Jorgensen report deep-water at• specific tasks and sharing responsibilities. A tempts at the comparisons between otter-trawl second theme is the concept of re-evaluation, and longline gears that are proving intractable wherein authors ask new questions of old data even at more moderate depths, and in the pro• or pose questions not previously addressed. A cess are forced into insupportable implicit third is that whaling is often based on species- assumptions. specific behaviour both by the animals and the Thorsteinsson and Valdimarsson give a hunters. A fourth is the relationship between valuable account of the problems of introducing whaling and society, including spiritual/religious new resources to the market and of an innova• elements, contributions of women, etc.. Finally, tive Icelandic program which met that challenge. there is the collaborative theme, developed from There are four short technical papers on various merging zoological, historical and cultural data gear developments for deep fisheries. The only into a holistic view of whaling and its sociocul- social-science contribution is a thought-provok• tural impacts. ing essay by Ommer on the failure of the indus• The papers are largely prehistoric/archaeo• trial development model as a basis for sustain• logical/anthropological in content, as befits the able fisheries. Unfortunately, it has no special Association through which the symposium was relevance to deep-water fisheries and will be lost presented, although the paper by H.W. Braham in this volume. on "Sex and Size Composition of Bowhead The literature on the world's deep-water Whales landed by Alaskan Eskimo Whalers" fisheries is so limited that many people, from diverts somewhat from the theme. Others pro• scientists to fishing-company executives, will vide specific commentary on a number of need occasional access to this book. However, diverse topics such as the archaeological evi• even specialists will likely find that an inter- dence for the origins of whaling in the western library loan proves sufficient. We must hope Arctic, the development and spread of the that our institutional libraries can stretch their whale-hunting complex in the Bering Strait, the budgets to purchase the necessary copies. use to which prehistoric inhabitants put cetacean species in the northern Gulf of Alaska, "Whale Trevor J. Kenchington Size Selection" by indigenous hunters of the Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia North American western Arctic and subarctic, prehistoric hunting of beluga whales in the 88 The Northern Mariner

Mackenzie delta, the roles of large mammals, frivolous title that masks the careful scholarship including whales and mammoths, in prehistoric and useful information contained in the book. economies, Siberian Eskimos as whalers and The book has two parts: an annotated and warriors, whaling surplus and the integration of abridged version of the New Zealand sections of prehistoric Alaskan economies through trade and Burr Osborn's 1892 account of his experiences war, and contemporary Alaska Eskimo bowhead in the South Pacific and an examination of other whaling villages. documentary accounts of life in the Foveaux Overall, the collection provides significant, Straits region. Osborn's text, penned after his well referenced information and discussion on retirement, focuses on his experiences around ethnological/archaeological etc. aspects of Foveaux Strait (which separates Stewart Island whaling in the western Arctic and subarctic, and from the South Island of New Zealand) in 1845. should be of particular interest to students and Richards provides very useful bridging sections, others in those disciplines. reducing portions of the text and providing additional background information to keep the Anthony B. Dickinson reader alerted to related developments, as well St. John's, Newfoundland as detailed footnotes. The second half of the book includes excerpts, interspersed with Rich• Rhys Richards. The Foveaux Whaling Yarns of ards' comments, from the writings of Osborn's Yankee Jack; Burr Osborn's adventures in contemporaries, including Bishop Selwyn, the southernNew Zealand, 1845. "Southern Heritage Rev. J. Wohlers and Edward Shortland. 150" series, No. 4. Dunedin North, NZ: Otago Osborn's account provides a useful but Heritage Books, 1995 [Otago Heritage Books, overly romantic description of life aboard the 500 Great King Street, Dunedin North, New whaling ships off the coast of New Zealand. He Zealand]. 152 pp., photographs, maps, illustra• offered extensive observations about Maori and tions, bibliography, index. $NZ 29.95 (+ $NZ 9 Pakcha (European) life in the region, but the second-class air postage), paper; ISBN 0- forty years that passed between his experiences 908774-12-5. in the region and the first publication of the book appears to have taken some of the sting Historians of whaling and whalers have been out of the southern winds. Most of the story is blessed with a relative abundance of first-hand recounted in a matter-of-fact fashion; the exotic accounts of the whaling enterprise. The danger• location and the author's experiences in a little- ous, difficult and disparate industry drew people known land, rather than gripping story-telling, to such far-flung regions as the Bering Strait and are the prime attractions of the book. Maritime the icy waters off Baffin Island, from Hudson historians will probably be most interested in the Bay to the South Pacific. A determined band of working man's perspectives on whaling and historians has performed yeoman service in early settlement; there are short but useful following the voyages and exploits of the descriptions of ship life, whaling activities, and whalers and bringing into print accounts of their land-based work. lives and times. While a few of these volumes The Foveaux Whaling Yarns of Yankee Jack have been serious scholarly tomes, the majority will be greatly appreciated by local historians, are the work of passionate amateur historians. for it provides useful insights into aspects of Rhys Richards is such a writer, a diplomat early European activity at the southern tip of the by profession but also an active historian of South Island of New Zealand. There are many whaling in the South Pacific. His tenacity in other positive aspects to the book, particularly pursuing sources is nicely recounted in the the careful editing and annotations by Rhys description of the search for a copy of Burr Richards. His decision to focus on regional con• Osborn's account of his work as a whaler off siderations — as shown by the omission of major New Zealand's South Island. His most recent sections of the original book that relate to other contribution to the broad fields of whaling and areas in the South Pacific and to devote half of New Zealand history is contained in The Fov• the book to other accounts of life in the Foveaux eaux Whaling Yarns of Yankee Jack, a somewhat Straits in the 1840s - will limit the utility of Book Reviews 89 this volume for historians interested in more people at length would have been inappropriate, general aspects of nineteenth-century Pacific but by concentrating on navigation techniques whaling. That, ultimately, is a shame, for Os- the author keeps to a theme which links these born's observations, gilded a little by the pass• less isolated sailors with their Oceanian cousins. age of time, nonetheless provide a useful and Representative of the dilemma faced by altogether too rare working class insight into the enthusiasts for the outrigger of tradition is the workings of the whaling industry. case of the Enewetak/Majuro canoe project of 1992. Carucci admits sailing canoes may soon Ken Coates disappear. (17) They have dwindled steadily Hamilton, New Zealand since World War II — each year scantier in number, size, and seaworthiness — and the Richard Feinberg (ed.). Seafaring in the Con• master craftsmen are not being replaced. The temporary Pacific Islands: Studies in Continuityrecen t project, meant to stimulate new pride, and Change. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univer• interest, and craft activity, did produce a fine sity Press, 1995. vii + 237 pp., maps, photo• museum specimen. The construction was quick, graphs, illustrations, figures, tables, index. US using modern power tools, but the canoe itself $35, cloth; ISBN 0-87580-201-X. was an orphan without a home or practical purpose. (3In) In fact, the outrigger's future can Ten ethnographic fieldworkers with experience hardly lie in a workaday direction. in the southwestern Pacific contribute to this The main alternative open may be ceremon- book with detailed reports on a scattering of ialized inter-island sport. Big, ocean-going Pacific communities. Four Melanesian studies canoes of the past (both the graceful raiding discuss the Louisiade archipelago (Maria Le- monohulls propelled by paddle and the often wet powsky), Trobriand Islands (Susan Montague, but always swift outriggers) stand as prototypes Harry Powell), and Marovo (Edvard Hviding). for two potential lines of further indigenous They are matched by three Polynesian studies: development. The sporting rules would have to Rotuman (Alan Howard), Sikaiana (William focus on keeping to nautical principles which Donner), and Nukumanu (Richard Feinberg). made the best regional forms true marvels for One paper deals with Micronesian seafarers their time and place. Interest would focus on (Lawrence Carucci on Enewetak) and another recombining design and construction details, (by Gene Ammarell) with Indonesia's best- new materials, hardware, and lighter rigging known seafarers, the Austronesian-speaking techniques. But turning local eyes to fresh Bugis of South Sulawesi. The editor's Introduc• options within their own cultural sphere was not tion, together with an Epilogue in which he is the guiding idea of the 1992 project. joined by Ward Goodenough, deal with the Anthropologists may have special interest in relevant literature and situate the new studies in reviewing the two articles on Trobriand seaman• comparative and historical frames. ship; they serve to remind us (by offering fresh Most of what we get is hands-on, practical knowledge on an already intensively researched accounts of the way Oceanians construct their Pacific community) how much there is still to paddle or sailing canoes, how the boats are know about the cultures our century has wanted rigged and handled on the water, special naviga• to snuff out. A more sanguine assessment of the tion aids, the importance locally attributed to future than Carucci's does emerge from the seafaring, and the particular patterns of inter- kula-trade region made famous by early Tro• island contact which result from local mixes of briand studies. Lepowski writes: tradition, technology, seasonal winds, and ocean The sea continues to be the primary currents. Change is dealt with carefully but in avenue to wealth and renown and to the piecemeal fashion imposed by the circum• risk of disappointment and tragedy in stance that much of the fieldwork dates back to the Louisiade Archipelago. Voyaging the 1970s or earlier. The Bugis paper is excep• by sailing and paddling canoes for sub• tional in dealing with large craft and profession• sistence, ritual, trade, and pleasure al seafarers; treating the colourful history of this remains central... (51) 90 The Northern Mariner

But this is from field work in the late 1970s. ing George Anson, James Cook, William Bligh, Islanders could well continue to seek renown and many others; and individual narratives by and even wisdom through travel, yet lose their slave traders, passengers, transported criminals, characteristic attachment to seafaring. indentured servants, and shipwrecked sailors. The best essay on maritime technology is Most wrote for profit; others wished to rehabili• probably Feinberg's, dealing with a relatively tate damaged reputations, to seek investors for isolated atoll whose people held onto many trad• commercial schemes, to make moral judgments, itional seafaring practices. Hviding, Donner, and or simply to advance their careers, While some particularly Howard deal explicitly with mari• narrators set out to write truthful accounts, their time history, querying the significance of early- desire for self-justification and need to entertain contact reports and weighing the consequences readers diminished authenticity, introduced the of sometimes deep intrusion during the colonial manipulations of editors and ghost writers, and period. A common theme in the three papers is sometimes led to totally apocryphal tales manu• that where seafaring remains a central interest, factured by unscrupulous hacks. its future will remain in local hands, whatever In 1697, Dampier achieved great success combinations of boat styles and techniques come with his highly original published journal, New into vogue. But the aesthetic or romantic Voyage Round the World which by 1705 was in motivational element in this survival of Pacific its fifth edition. Unlike many other voyagers and traditions will have to be compatible with the buccaneers, Dampier kept detailed records of his sound and smell of a cranky outboard motor, observations that entertained his readers while he and islanders will have to cope with the insistent glossed over many of the negative aspects of ripple-effects which flow from such devices. pirate life. Subsequently, Dampier failed miserably as a ship's captain and expedition George Park commander. When William Funnell and Woodes Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island Rogers published accounts that belittled Dam• pier, he replied in print with his own self-vindi• Philip Edwards. The Story of the Voyage: Sea- cation. As the century progressed, many navi• Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. gators and crew members engaged in wars of Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer• words published in books, pamphlets, and sity Press, 1994. x + 244 pp., illustrations, broadsides. Anson's disastrous expedition in bibliography, index. £35, cloth; ISBN 0-521- 1741 gave rise to several survival narratives by 41301-X. men aboard his vessels who experienced ship• wreck, deprivations, escapes, imprisonment by Few readers purchase books that chronicle un• South American Indians, or felt compelled eventful ocean voyages. Exact navigational data, because of allegations of mutiny to justify information on routine ship management, and controversial actions. John Byron did not publish scientific observations may draw a specialized his exaggerated account, the fourth book about readership, but not a large book-buying public. the wreck of the Wager until 1768, and in the In eighteenth-century England, ocean voyage process he resurrected the myth of the Patagon- narratives became very popular because they ian giants. One last narrative published in 1751 amazed, titillated, entertained, and sometimes attributed to the ship's cooper, John Young, and horrified a broad readership hungry for tales accepted by many modem historians as real was about shipboard crises, mutinies, catastrophic in Edwards' view a complete fake. wrecks, captivity in exotic places, and passionate The commanders of expeditions sponsored dalliances with sensual native women. Edwards by the Admiralty carried specific orders to divides this fascinating study about the writing, submit their logs and journals along with all of editing, and publication of voyage narratives those kept by all officers, sailors, and passen• into three general parts: accounts by William gers. In many cases, this regulation was imposs• Dampier the "founder" and his associates; ible to keep as disgruntled or profit-hungry writings by the Pacific Ocean explorers from voyagers rushed into print to get their stories George Shelvocke to George Vancouver includ• before an interested public. In the case of the Book Reviews 91 official account of James Cook's first voyage to ing illnesses and brushes with shipwreck. The Tahiti, the official editor, Dr. John Hawkes- accounts by passengers and voyage autobiogra• worth, who had never been on an oceanic phies provided writers with many opportunities voyage, altered the voyage account so much that for fiction or dramatic alterations of true in some instances he made Cook express his accounts. For a long time Robert Drury's adven• own views. With no other version available for ture at Madagascar was thought to be the fic• over one hundred years, Edwards argues that tional creation of Daniel Defoe. Women passen• Hawkesworth helped to set the scene for later gers reported the discomforts of shipboard life, Victorian attitudes about subject peoples. Fol• but most lacked the confidence to say much lowing the second expedition, Cook rejected an about their trips. In fact, the best marine autobi• oral agreement that the expedition scientist, ographies, such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johann Reinhold Forster, should publish the were pure fiction that left actual voyagers and voyage account. In the end both published with their editors the daunting task of making their Forster's son George assisting his father. The own work appear anywhere near as interesting. younger Forster expressed deep concerns about Even when revised by ghost writers, true stories the gratuitous use of firearms and recognized the about transportation, shipwreck, and other negative impact of European culture upon the disasters by poorly educated participants did not Pacific natives. Challenging the idyllic paradise produce truly great literature. of Tahiti described by other writers, George Edwards describes the voyage narratives as Forster reported human faeces strewn along the "dynamic re-creations" that originated with the pathways and lice upon the heads of women real events and then became transformed from who made love to English crewmen. that point up to the actual publication. Edwards' Edwards explains how William Bligh own work with the voyage narratives is informa• manipulated the published record of the Bounty tive, comprehensive, interesting, and thoroughly voyage so as to illustrate his leadership before stimulating. In a word, this outstanding study is and after the mutiny, While he accepts Greg an essential guide for any reader who enters the Dening's conclusions, Edwards also honours world of the eighteenth-century voyagers. Fletcher Christian for rejecting Bligh's oral abuses. On the other hand, Edwards will surprise Christon I. Archer many readers with his sharp criticisms of Calgary, Alberta George Vancouver's journal which he describes as "stilted, pompous, periphrastic, ponderous, Suzanne Schwarz (ed. & intro.). Slave Captain: and above all humourless." (129) In fact, The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Vancouver made an effort to stress the scientific Slave Trade. Wrexham, Clwyd: Bridge Books, aspects of oceanic exploration, maintained 1995. 164 pp., maps, notes, bibliography, index. accuracy, and down-played the adventure story £8.95, paper; ISBN 1-872424-42-2. line. Moreover, Vancouver died prematurely, leaving his brother to edit his very rough manu• Until well into the twentieth century, the British script and jumbled notes for publication. In the carried more people across the Atlantic than any end, certain sections that were to have focused other shipping power. Despite the great size of upon native cultures had to be deleted. this movement, as well as the attention received The chapters treating the slave trade, pass• by migration history from Britain, they actually engers accounts, autobiographies, and the infor- carried three Africans to the New World for tunates illustrate a broad variety of changing every European down to the beginning of the views. Many writers described their own shock nineteenth century. The British were in fact the at observing the brutalities of the slave trade largest and most successful of all transatlantic while others considered Africans simply as slave carriers. One consequence is that it is still commercial commodities or even believed that possible to discover major new sources as the they would be better off as New World planta• present volume underlines. tion workers. Some writers involved in the slave James Irving sailed on nine slave trading trade experienced dramatic conversions follow• voyages - the last two as captain - in the 1780s 92 The Northern Mariner and 1790s when British slaving was at its zenith. way to Guinea, complaining of the inhumane He began as one of the many Scottish surgeons behaviour of the pirates. Perhaps such an inabil• in the trade, and assumed his first command, not ity to appreciate the irony of his situation coincidentally in all likelihood, in the immediate reduces the value of the material, but I think aftermath of Dolben's Act — the legislation not. It is perhaps more human, closer to the aimed at improving shipboard conditions for spirit of the age, and even more attractive to the slaves. Wrecked on the Moroccan coast four modern reader than Captain Crow's weeks into his first voyage as captain, Irving defensiveness, and John Newton's mea culpa, to and his crew spent more than a year in the mention just two other contemporary memoirs captivity of people loosely described as "Arabs," by slave captains. before the British government was able to Perhaps because of Irving's blind spot, the negotiate their release. During this time Irving editor does not make a great deal of it either. kept ajournai which was deposited at the Lan• She notes the irony, of course, but could have cashire Record Office in the late 1970s. The explored further Irving's unawareness of it. journal itself is short, taking up only twenty of Memoirs of Crow, Newton, Falconbridge, Canot the pages of the current book, but along with the and others were written for publication in an age manuscript were deposited forty letters, most when abolition became a reality. Because this written by Irving and all of which are printed document was not intended for publication, we here. Suzanne Schwarz has edited and annotated are given an opportunity to view the mind-set of this material and written an introduction that a practitioner of a trade which the modem age comprises half the finished work. Although not finds incomprehensible. But for the price I a specialist in this field, she has carried out would recommend this book to undergraduates these tasks in an exemplary manner. She is on as well as to specialists. top of the recent literature and her commentary is invariably judicious. David Eltis The combination of journal and letters Kingston, Ontario separates the collection from memoirs written by other slave trading captains. Most important of David F. Marley. Pirates: Adventurers of the all from the standpoint of the modem scholar, High Seas. London: Arms & Armour Press, perhaps, is the irony that here we have prospec• 1995. 160 pp., illustrations (b+w, colour), maps, tive slave purchasers made captive, and ajournai figures, select bibliography, index. US $29.95, of the process to boot. Irving was sold first to Cdn $41.95, cloth; ISBN 1-85409-215-4. Dis• the local potentate, Sheik Brahim, and eventual• tributed by Sterling Publishing, New York. ly to the Emperor of Morocco, Sultan Moham• med III. For the first few months of their captiv• David Marley is an accomplished scholar of ity Irving and the crew were slaves. Though Spanish American maritime history. However, in frequently threatened with a life of servile this profusely illustrated retelling of the notable labour in Moroccan agriculture, Irving's tasks exploits of all the major pirates associated with appear to have been those of a personal servant the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, and of rather than a field labourer. After purchase by English pirates dispersed elsewhere in the early the Sultan, however, the status of the prisoners eighteenth century, he is not attempting to offer changed to one of parole, or at worst, persons new information or interpretation. subject to house arrest. Letters written by Irving Perhaps an exuberant tour of buccaneering during and after his captivity complain bitterly can be excused some of its own escapes from about his treatment, but his situation apparently discipline. Stirring accounts of major plundering induced no self-reflection or awareness of the raids by privateers and naval squadrons are Golden Rule, though the abolition campaign was included, though Marley knows that vital legal by then already underway in Britain. The Irving niceties separated these from piracy. Dispensing material is reminiscent of letters in the Colonial with footnotes is a liberty some may applaud, Office files from families of British sailors taken but it lets the author snatch the ideas of scholars by Barbary pirates earlier in the century on their and the words of witnesses in ways that are Book Reviews 93

rather piratical. The reader/viewer is not allowed Frances Wilkins. Strathclyde'sSmuggling Story. to be serious about the graphic representation of Kidderminster, Worcs.: Wyre Forest Press, 1992 pirates either; credits are only occasionally [8 Mill Close, Blakedown, Kidderminster, offered for the numerous black and white pic• Worcs. DY10 3NQ, UK]. 126 pp., maps, appen• tures, and neither painters nor dates of paintings dix, bibliography. £6.95, paper; ISBN 1-897725- are given for the dramatic colour plates. 02-7. Although the numerous plates are offered without much comment, detailed diagrams help Anyone familiar with the deep layer of legend explain some individual expeditions particularly and hype that surrounds rum-running in Canada well. There is also a very good select bibliogra• will identify with Frances Wilkins's attempts to phy that invites the curious to explore the provide a reliable account of smuggling in rapidly growing scholarship on the social, Scotland. In her five books on Scottish smuggl• economic, and political history of Caribbean ing Wilkins has made a serious attempt to go pirates and their suppressors. beyond the hype and nostalgia that turns every This celebration of early modern armed obscure inlet into a "Smuggler's Cove." She robbery with violence is a light coffee table draws on a diligent search through documentary book, though it might better be kept beyond the sources centred on Customs House letterbooks reach of both the squeamish and the impression• but also using a good survey of diaries, private able. papers, travellers ' descriptions and contemporary press reports. To filter out modern distortion Ian K. Steele Wilkins emphasizes a "they-saw-it-happen" London, Ontario approach, using period quotations whenever possible to carry the narrative. She also applies Frances Wilkins. Dumfries & Galloway's Smug• this approach to her illustrations, relying on gling S/ory. Kidderminster, Worcs.: Wyre Forest period engraving and maps, pointing out that Press, 1993 [8 Mill Close, Blakedown, Kidder• even some Ordnance Survey maps have minster, Worcs. DY10 3NQ, UK]. 126 pp., bestowed the names of fictional smugglers on illustrations, maps, bibliography. £6.95, paper; isolated coves. ISBN 1-897725-03-5. Preferring to start from a clean slate, Wil• kins generally stays away from using or correct• Frances Wilkins. The Isle of Man in Smuggling ing the folklore of smuggling, although she does History. Kidderminster, Worcs.: Wyre Forest offer several cases where documentary evidence Press, 1992 [8 Mill Close, Blakedown, Kidder• matches legend. For example, in The Smuggling minster, Worcs. DY10 3NQ, UK]. 123 pp., Story of Northern Shores, customs letters illustrations, maps, bibliography. £5.95, paper; describe the death of smuggler Philip Kennedy ISBN 1-897725-00-0. in much the same way as traditional local history, although details such as the glint of Frances Wilkins. The Smuggling Story of the cutlasses in the moonlight are not to be found in Northern Shores. Kidderminster, Worcs.: Wyre the official records. Forest Press, 1995 [8 Mill Close, Blakedown, For regional historians in Scotland and Kidderminster, Worcs. DY10 3NQ, UK]. 206 genealogists, these books will be valuable, pp., illustrations, maps, tables, photographs, offering a thorough documentary fleshing out appendices, bibliography, nominal index. £7.95, the shadowy episodes and legendary characters paper; ISBN 1-897725-05-1. that populate the world of smuggling. Many other interested readers, however, will be disap• Frances Wilkins. The Smuggling Story of Two pointed. Aside from demanding an intimate Firths. Kidderminster, Worcs.: Wyre Forest knowledge of Scottish history and geography, Press, 1993 [8 Mill Close, Blakedown, Kidder• Wilkins' approach is frustrating to both an minster, Worcs. DY10 3NQ, UK]. 205 pp., historian and a general reader of sea stories. All illustrations, maps, figures, appendix, bibliogra• five books are almost completely descriptive in phy, index. £7.95, paper; ISBN 1-897725-06-X. nature, providing few conclusions and offering 94 The Northern Mariner no analysis of issues that would interest the bare-bones index of personal names (but not of historian. The history of smuggling has raised vessels!) and a bit more of an introduction and some interesting questions: Were smugglers conclusion. It is to be hoped that Wilkins's plans popular working class rebels or mere pawns of for further work will harness her commendable big business? Does the scale of smuggling research to broader horizons. seriously erode the trade figures so beloved of economic historians? Did smuggling vessels and Dan Conlin revenue cutters make important contributions in Halifax, Nova Scotia vessel design? Wilkins offers few answers to these questions, although fragmentary insights Robert S. Weddle. Changing Tides: Twilight and abound in her extensive primary research. There Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763-1803. College is much fodder in the vast number of richly Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, described examples for a more thorough dis• 1995. xvii + 352 pp., maps, photographs, illus• cussion of these issues. The researcher will also trations, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. US be frustrated by an almost complete lack of $49.50, cloth; ISBN 0-89096-661-3. indexing, in contrast to her detailed and pro• fessional description and citation of sources. Weddle's book treats the geographical explora• The smuggling books also suffer in places tion of the Gulf of Mexico between the end of from a lack of definition and organization. the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the sale of Although Wilkins promises to tell the smuggling Louisiana to the United States in 1803. It com• story of northern shores, it later emerges that her pletes the author's trilogy on the exploration of study is confined almost completely to the the Gulf of Mexico. eighteenth century. While tid-bits of seizures in The efforts at reconnaissance during the the nineteenth century are offered as an induce• period under discussion were undertaken by ment for further study, several of her books Spanish, English and French expeditions. Each make an awkward leap from brandy smugglers nation sought the information for similar pur• of the 1790s to drug seizures in the 1990s. poses: potential occupation, military security and General readers of nonaction sea stories ease of transportation. The events surrounding will also find the smuggling series hard slog• the Seven Years' War and the war for Ameri• ging. It has little of the dramatic narrative of can independence and the ways in which older popular works such as E. K. Chatterton's Louisiana and Florida changed hands provided King's Cutters and Smugglers (1912). While the an eventful context for exploration. "they-saw-it-happen" approach is laudable, the The period was one of tremendous import• long quotations and detailed paraphrases are ance diplomatically for Europe and America, sometimes hard to follow and the reason why and this book describes a host of activities they are cited is often unclear. While Wilkins which formed a part of these events, if not the has struggled to avoid the fabrication and mis• seminal part. It is wonderful to have a study of leading interpretation that has often marked these years, and to have it couched in the larger previous writing on smuggling, one often longs context. The fact that the book concentrates on for an informed interpretation of what the a multi-national region and has a body of water quotations mean and a balanced assessment of as its focus is both a very timely approach and what has been left out of the official record. a sensible one. Further, the book treats a frontier Little sense of character or background emerges region (Louisiana in particular), which provides around either smugglers or customs officials. the occasion to discuss the interaction of Span• They all seem to blur into the predictable ish, French, English and Indian elements. This moulds of "notorious, wily smugglers" or "frus• is an approach with significant value, and also trated, resentful custom officials." helps to make the study quite timely. Wilkins's more recent books in the series, Points that are stressed in the work include The Smuggling Story of Two Firths and The the tremendous difficulties associated with Smuggling Story of Northern Shores, correct exploring several stretches of the Gulf coast — some of these shortcomings, offering at least a difficulties which resulted in poor knowledge, Book Reviews 95 numerous shipwrecks, strategic possibilities her construction at Wallace, Nova Scotia in being lost or remaining unknown, and much 1873. It is a tale full of setbacks and frustra• cartography based on second-hand information. tions, beginning with strife among the vessel's The transition from an era of exploration for owners, the board members of the Wallace strategic or economic purposes alone to one of Shipbuilding Company, and their disagreement notable scientific motivation is also discussed. It with her builder Gilbert Purdy, which led to a is a key feature of the late eighteenth century, four-month delay in her launching. and influenced geographic expeditions through• It appears that the Rover was one of those out the world, no less on the Gulf than among vessels which, after a bad start, become dogged the more noted expeditions in South America with ill luck. Thus, on her maiden voyage, she and the Pacific. ran into heavy weather before she had even Weddle's research impresses. He is famil• cleared Chedabucto Bay, went aground in the iar with materials in French, Spanish and Eng• Charles while under tow upriver to Boston, lish, housed at repositories in Mexico, the where her Captain, Zabud A. MacKay, suffered United States, Britain, France, and Spain. It is great frustration in his dealings with customs rare to find an author who works with all of agents and the consignees with respect to the these. He is intimately familiar with the litera• delivery of his cargo of Wallace brownstone. ture of maritime history, and that of shipwreck Well clear of Boston, Rover took on her archaeology. On the other hand, one area in next cargo, a load of flour, at Portland for Saint which the author might have been better served John, New Brunswick. Close to her destination, is in the editing. An overall thesis is elusive, for on 25 January 1874, the vessel was beating up example. The book begins to stress the relation the Grand Manan Channel when a severe winter of the Enlightenment to eighteenth-century storm drove her on to the cliffs at Money Cove. exploration, but the nature of that relationship Fortunately, there was no loss of life and, after itself is neglected until later in the book, and several days of privation, all were safely trans• consists primarily of noting that the Hamilton ported to Saint John. The poor crewmen, who chronometer had become available. Clarity had lost everything in the wreck, were paid off. would also have been improved by indicating The owners, on the other hand, suffered no great the "conclusions" to each section at the begin• loss, as both vessel and cargo had been fully ning of the section. This would have provided insured. additional shape and direction while also reduc• What makes this little book different from ing the slight tendency to anecdotal history many recent publications of a similar nature is which emerges despite the book's professional the obvious effort the author has made, not only goal. In addition, several insightful points are to track down the documentary evidence, but to mentioned in the conclusions but not fully incorporate so much of it into the book in the addressed in the text, such as the Bourbon form of facsimiles or transcripts. Those illus• Family Compact. trated include the specifications for the vessel Overall, this is a pioneering work, replete drawn up by Dr. Zabud W. Kempton, various with valuable information. The author's famili• agreements, lists and the vessel's registration. arity with the material and the region impresses. There are also maps of Rover's voyage and Grand Manan Island plus a few relevant photo• William J. McCarthy graphs. This is all great stuff, though the quality Wilmington, North Carolina of three ink drawings, of unidentified origin, leaves something to be desired. Dorothy Dobson. The Story of Brigantine Rover. In fact, if one ignores some odd word usage Port William, NS: Mariner Books, 1996. 52 pp., and an insistence upon describing the nature, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, glossary. fixed or flashing, of each and every light men• $5.95, paper; ISBN 0-9698501-2-3. tioned, there is only one real problem with The Story of Brigantine Rover. This lies in the Dorothy Dobson's account of the brief history author's attempt to dramatize the history, by of the 272.79 ton brigantine Rover begins with telling it from the captain's point of view and 96 The Northern Mariner

putting words into his mouth and thoughts into selected, specialized sources, the editors have his head. No matter that such words and attempted what might be described as an illus• thoughts might find support in documentary trated portrait of the Navy through time. On evidence, the bare facts of this little study are of grounds of attractiveness in appearance, quality significant interest to hold a reader's attention. of illustrations, and sheer size this book prom• As a result, it might have been better to stick to ises to give the general reader considerable food these and comment upon same. for thought, besides some recent perspectives on Notwithstanding the above, the story of the naval scholarship. Rover offers a basic well-documented account of It might also be said that at last British a vessel in the coastal cargo trade in the 1870s. naval history, for the general reader at least, has With the addition of official chicanery, ship• gone beyond Nelson and progressed beyond wreck and survival, it takes on all the attributes Jutland. Not that these subjects are uninteresting of a good yarn. (far from it) but they are overly done. The book under review includes a chapter by Roger Robin H. Wyllie Morris on scientific and humanitarian duties of East LaHave, Nova Scotia the Navy, and one can only wish that this had been larger in scope and more thorough in the J.R. Hill (ed.). The Oxford Illustrated History of Navy's duties as guardian of Pax Britannica. the Royal Navy. Oxford & New York: Oxford Then again, that hardest of naval topics seldom University Press, 1995. xiv + 480 pp., illustra• gets scholarly attention. The education of the tions and photographs (b+w, colour), maps, Navy, by John Winton, is equally a fine addition figures, chronology, further reading, index. £25, to the book and to scholarship generally. The Cdn $66.95, cloth; ISBN 0-19-211675-4. themes developed in that chapter suggest them• selves for a good book on the same subject. The As a subject for inquiry the history of Britain's military, or "sharp-end," chapters cover expected navy presents great prospects and numerous territory for a book such as this. Indeed, those challenges. The annals of England's naval chapters by John Hattendorf, James Goldrick heritage are writ powerfully with the great and Eric Grove are useful albeit brief reviews achievements of the fighting marine; indeed, no that anchor the rest of the book, so to speak. history of England, or the United Kingdom and Special attention is due to Geoffrey Till's British Empire, can be framed without signifi• incisive portrait of the era 1919-1939, and the cant reference to the seas and sea power. But all revival of the Royal Navy from its period of too often general surveys of British maritime destitution. David K. Brown's hard-hitting ascendancy give less than critical assessment to analysis of material transition, 1815-1895, is as the role of the Royal Navy in imperial expan• good a precis of that subject as general students sion, foreign trade and diplomacy, and the many of the subject will need. Daniel Baugh's chapter unheralded little duties that were the workaday on the Navy asanational institution, 1690-1815, activity of Britain's sea service. Even less shows this scholar at his best; and in another attention is given to the social history of the important way, this vital chapter on finance and Navy — to those who became officers and to administration, reform and revitalization is those who were of the lower deck. Much of the central not only to England's glory but to the problem relates to the size of the task, which is well-being of the wooden walls of England. formidable. In addition, history as an academic Altogether this is a welcome addition to the and scholarly discipline continues to change — literature, a credit to editors, publisher and towards specialization and away from surveys authors alike. Many will want to purchase the and generalizations. The work under review, book for its illustrations alone. But others will consisting as it does of fourteen chapters, pro• find in its pages useful points of view and, vides individual assessments of themes or moreover, avenues for new inquiry. periods, and makes no overall attempt to provide a uniform critique of naval history or Barry Gough historiography. As a general work, based on Waterloo, Ontario Book Reviews 97

Simon Foster. Hit the Beach! Amphibious unforeseen role of luck. The speed and precision Warfare from the Plains of Abraham to San of the forces involved do much to maintain the Carlos Water. London: Arms & Armour, 1995. operation as a classic, despite MacArthur's later 223 pp., maps, b+w plates & photographs, downfall. Finally, Foster turns to San Carlos in appendices, select bibliography, index. Cdn 1982 — the recovery of the Falkland Islands on $41.95, US $29.95, cloth; ISBN 1-85409-268-5. a shoestring. Against world military opinion and Distributed by Sterling Publishing, New York. accepted principles, British forces were assem• bled and transported 8,000 miles, assaulted their The combined forces amphibious assault is objective and went on to defeat a numerically perhaps the most hazardous and complex of all superior enemy in a triumph of determination military operations, involving detailed and over doctrine. extensive planning, split-second schedules and Hit the Beach! is a well written account of depending completely for success on uncompro• four different amphibious assaults.Though span• mising cooperation between all air, land and sea ning over two centuries, the lessons they demon• forces involved. It is also one most exciting and strate remain relevant today, particularly in an dramatic to recount, with each individual action era when modern replenishment techniques can amongst all forms contributing to the ultimate keep amphibious forces at sea for months and success or failure of the operation. still project power in a low-key yet definite This then is the subject of Hit the Beach! — fashion. Foster supports his analysis in a master• a detailed and informed look at the conduct of ful manner, bringing events to life with an easy four amphibious campaigns, their planning, narrative and thorough research. He draws paral• execution and outcome, with assessments of lels from the three successful operations, but each based on common principles of military does not hesitate to describe the shortcomings of theory. Author Simon Foster identifies four the Dardanelles campaign, which was an un• distinct phases of the combined operation — questioned failure. Thanks to Foster's analysis, Preparation, Assault, Consolidation, and Break- this reviewer finally obtained a clear picture of Out — but in each of his case studies, almost what the Dardanelles landing was supposed to half of the narrative is devoted to a discussion achieve, not to mention the political infighting and assessment of the vitally important and which set the scene for an expensive disaster. usually dramatic period of the Assault. One must also admire the British and French The first campaign is the assault on Quebec soldiers for enduring the most appalling condi• in 1759, a daring and innovative night assault by tions, including ammunition shortages, water British troops from warships anchored in the St. problems, and of course a most determined and Lawrence River. Commanded by General Sir well-led enemy. In short, Gallipoli provides a James Wolfe (who did not survive the ensuing good text book approach to how not to do it! battle), the British scaled a steep cliff-top path Throughout all accounts the author tells the to the Abraham Heights. From that commanding dramatic story using the words of those present position they captured the town of Quebec. as much as possible — he has spoken to many Next, Foster turns to the Dardanelles campaign participants in the Falklands War in particular — of 1915-16, the imaginatively conceived but to give a unique approach to the work. The now infamous Anglo-French landings on Galli- material is very well organized, and the illustra• poli which were supposed to force Turkey out of tions are pertinent and well captioned. A com• World War I. The confusion during the prepara• prehensive bibliography is provided, while tion for the landings foreshadowed defeat for all appendices identify the senior officers and units subsequent operations. It is a story of endurance involved in the operations (except for General and heroism as well as bureaucratic inertia. The Wolfe's assault on Quebec). This informed and third operation is the landing in Inchon, Korea entertaining book will suit any interest in these in 1950. A textbook amphibious assault planned most dramatic operations. and led by General MacArthur, Inchon con• firmed the importance of planning and logistics Douglas G. Meredith in successful operations. It also highlights the Ottawa, Ontario 98 The Northern Mariner

Jon Guttman. Defiance at Sea: Stories of Dra• Robert Latham (ed.); William Matthews and matic Naval Warfare. London: Arms & Armour, Charles Knighton (transcription). Samuel Pepys 1995. 192 pp., maps, b+w plates & photographs, and the Second Dutch War: Pepy s's Navy White index. US $24.95, Cdn $34.95, cloth; ISBN 1- Book and Brooke House Papers. Aldershot, 85409-240-5. Distributed by Sterling Publishing, Hants, and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press for the New York. Navy Records Society, 1995. xxxix + 488 pp., glossary, index. US $76.95, cloth; ISBN 1- This book is described by its distributors as 85928-136-2. "true-life stories of "last stands" afloat — valiant sea fights in the face of daunting odds...tales of This substantial volume constitutes Robert heroism and hard fighting." In fact, Jon Gut- Latham's final contribution to naval history (he tman's Defiance at Sea is actually less melo• died shortly after checking the page proofs). It dramatic than such an introduction might lead is a well-edited compilation of important docu• one to expect. ments by, and relating to, Samuel Pepys in his The author has drawn upon a variety of role as Clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board, both recent and not-so-recent published second• drawn from the unpublished Pepys manuscripts ary sources in order to describe fourteen one• in Magdalene College, Cambridge. Latham sided naval engagements which took place from provides cross references to relevant documenta• the sixteenth century up to the present time. In tion in the Public Record Office and to Pepys's so doing, Guttman displays a predilection for diary. An exceptionally fine index has been American and Japanese naval forces, which are provided by Charles Knighton. the subject of seven of these narratives. His The title is somewhat misleading. The "intentionally eclectic compendium" includes events of the Second Dutch War occupy only a familiar actions such as Richard Grenville and modest portion of Pepys's White Book of 1663- the Revenge at the Azores in 1591, Horatio 1672, while the investigation of wartime expen• Nelson and the Agamemnon at Cape St. Vincent diture, conducted by the Brooke House Commis• in 1797, the German cruiser Emden in the sion between 1668 and 1670, is more revealing Indian Ocean in 1914, and the US Navy's Task for Pepys's actions and the politics of the latter Unit 77.4.3 at Leyte Gulf in 1944. Guttman also period than of the War itself. The evidence, includes lesser familiar actions such as the however, is of great value in advancing our Confederate ironclad Arkansas at Vicksburg in understanding of the behind-the-scenes conduct 1862, the British submarine B.ll in the Sea of of affairs and attitudes of participants within the Marmara in 1914, the Japanese armed merchant Royal Navy (in particular at the Board), the cruiser Hokoku Maru off the Cocos Islands in politics of the Navy at the English Court, and, 1942, and the Argentinean submarine San Luis not least, Pepys's own actions, thoughts and off the Falklands in 1982. predilections. The White Book was Pepys's The author's approach means that Defiance private record of the Board's debates and trans• at Sea is really a series of articles which will actions, and how Board members and sundry appeal to a general audience, more suited to ship commanders, pursers, and contractors discharged their responsibilities. The first half of publication in a magazine like Military History the volume, up to 1666, was written almost (of which Guttman is editor), rather than in the entirely in Pepys's distinctive, secretive, short• form of a book with the somewhat arbitrary hand (reproduced here from the transcription theme of one-sided naval combat. Nevertheless, originally accomplished by the late William for anyone looking for a series of interesting yet Matthews). The contents reflect Pepys's inter• otherwise unrelated naval engagements which ests, in particular his desire to collect evidence span several centuries, this book might well justifying his own views on naval matters and prove appealing. chronicling the shortcomings of superiors, colleagues and underlings within the Navy. As Peter Robertson such, the evidence is selected and opinionated, Ottawa, Ontario even inflammatory, and cannot be used in Book Reviews 99 isolation, apart from as a record of the Clerk's knowledgeable. This reviewer found only one view of naval matters. The Brooke House error: Pepys' reference in his Brooke House Papers are equally of interest. This is an editor• Commission journal to the work of "the Audi• ial compilation of documents created in reaction tors" of the naval accounts is incautiously to the work of the statutory Commission, and assigned to the Auditor of the Receipt of the includes Pepys's strenuous refutation of the Exchequer (380) — a very different office from eighteen "Observations" made against the Navy the Auditors of Imprests mentioned in full two Board by the Commission, his defence of his paragraphs later. In summation, this is a valu• own conduct in the administration of the war• able publication and a worthy addition to the time Navy, and, most importantly, the private publications of the Navy Records Society. journal which describes, in loving detail, his own principal role in the public hearings on the J.D. Alsop Commissioners' charges adjudicated by the King Canborough, Ontario and Privy Council between 3 January and 21 February 1670. In the last, Pepys is at his best Nicholas Tracy. Manila Ransomed: The British in providing fluent, copious accounts of the Assault on Manila in the Seven Years War. proceedings, revelling in his powers of memory Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995. xvii + and his own importance. 158 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, In 1664 Pepys noted how little faith was to index. £14.95, US $29.95, ISBN 0-85989-426-6. be given to the words of merchants, and none to Distributed in North America by Northwestern those accorded the greatest confidence by the University Press, Evanston, IL Board. Pepys, indeed, appear to have possessed little faith in, or goodwill towards, any individ• Nicholas Tracy has devoted much of his pro• ual concerned with naval affairs who did not fessional life to the study of naval, maritime and share his own views on the topics of the day. diplomatic history in the middle years of the His memoranda are a litany of knavery, abuse, eighteenth century. This volume, which illumi• unthriftiness, corruption and misuse of office. nates one episode at the end of the Seven Years' Along the way we are treated to some charming War, shows the author's command of the docu• vignettes: the gentleman commander Charles mentary and secondary sources, and familiarity O'Brien (recommended principally for the with wider imperial themes. quality of his dancing) who appeared before the The 1762 capture of Manila (often erron• Board to complain about the non-payment of a eously described as the "capture of the seaman's ticket for one of his kinsmen, only to Philippines" which Tracy makes very clear is have it repeated, behind his back, that the whole quite a different thing), is always mentioned in Exchange knew the seaman was his mistress general texts, often as a sign of Pitt the Elder's carried on board in male apparel; the "famous far-seeing strategic vision. It then fades from bawd" Damaris Page, "the great bawd of the scholarly view, because being captured after the seaman" (217) of whom favoured commanders preliminary peace agreement, it was destined to boasted in 1669 that they would never lack for be returned to Spain without compensation. sailors so long as she lived. The editor is per• What Tracy has done in this book is to throw haps too ready to take Pepys at his own word, much light on what was conceived as a major not least in the hearings on the Brooke House attempt to gain a bigger and more direct slice of Commission, for which the Council records are the China trade. Ambitious army and navy almost wholly silent and the Commissioners' officers, East India Company directors, and avid point of view is missing. Nevertheless, Pepys is, cartographers, all pushed the idea forward on a as always, witty, lively, opinionated and close to receptive government. the centre of the fray, and his thoughts are well The scheme finally decided upon required worth knowing. a large contribution in ships, money and troops This volume achieves its purpose in bring• from the East India Company. The Directors ing central portions of Pepys's naval writings agreed, in contemplation of the vast riches into public view. The edition is careful and expected from opening the China trade to a 100 The Northern Mariner more direct British involvement, based on the condition, extracted they said under duress, or permanent occupation of Manila. This partner• after the War ended. The British Officers, and ship was to prove problematic. The Directors the East India Company of course, were indig• soon got cold feet over the expense, and while nant, and demanded London's support in seeing some of the Company officials were very pro• justice done. As Tracy makes clear, London was fessional and cooperative, others were obstruc• insufficiently interested to push the matter to tive as the going got tough. The Company extremes. Tracy gives a quick tour of these officer who assumed control from the military negotiations, and illustrates how the issue after the conquest, Drake, was frankly corrupt, dragged on for years as a handy bargaining and skimmed off much wealth in bribes and point, for example in the 1771 Falklands Crisis. kickbacks. The regular officers, who behaved Ultimately, no money was paid and the issue with commendable professionalism, Cornish for faded into footnote status until now. the Navy, and Draper for the Army, were This is a fine treatment of a neglected disgusted beyond description, and cooperation event, explained within the context of the times broke down rapidly after the fighting ceased. by a scholar who is intimately familiar with the The Spanish were even worse off. Manila sources and the issues. Complaints are few, the never expected to suffer a siege from a Euro• major one being maps. Maps there are, very pean army, and was weakly garrisoned. The pretty ones reproduced from the eighteenth-cen• walls looked impressive, but were not up to a tury originals; regrettably they are so dark and modern assault. Worse, the Governor had recent• small of scale as to resemble ink blots. More by ly died, and the custom was for the Archbishop way of warning than complaint, the naval- to assume command until a replacement arrived. military sequences are brief and clinical, reflect• Archbishop Rojo, whatever other qualities he ing perhaps the actual fighting. Readers will find might have possessed, was incapable of military more of personalities, politics, methods and command, nor would he delegate power to the administration than stirring description. These handful of professional officers who were are small points, and there is no hesitation in present. When the British force arrived it caused recommending this book as a fine and authori• panic, and even though it seems in retrospect tative account of the Manila campaign and its pitifully small, it was able to land troops and aftermath. artillery sufficient to batter the walls and induce a hurried capitulation from Rojo. The British Paul Webb had triumphed quickly and at relatively little London, Ontario human cost. At that point, they began to learn the painful lesson common to numerous armed William M. Fowler, Jr.. Silas Talbot, Captain of forces: winning the battle is the easy bit; it is Old Ironsides. Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport winning the peace which brings grief. Museum, 1995. xvi + 231 pp., illustrations, In a nutshell, the hoped for riches did not maps, photographs, index. US $29.95, cloth; materialize, neither in fantasized plunder, nor in ISBN 0-913372-73-0. a flood of China trade. The small occupying force found it difficult to control territory much At the risk of judging this book by the elegant beyond the city walls, and as rural resistance portrait of Captain Silas Talbot on the cover, I was organized around some Spanish officers, the anticipated a standard biography of a pleasant, food supply even became precarious. Friction intelligent, and prosperous hero of the American developed between regular force officers and the Revolution. Silas Talbot, the man, was all this Company officials. Worse yet, word finally and more. As brash and fearless in peace as he trickled in that the Peace of Paris was settled, was in war, Talbot eagerly seized the opportun• and Manila was to be returned to Spain. Here ities available in the new nation he had helped was the start of unending legal battles, for it create. In Talbot's story, William Fowler adds a transpired the British had demanded successfully human dimension to the history of post-Revol• of Rojo a ransom of $4 million. Now, the utionary America. Spanish government refused to honour this Fowler lays out Talbot's life in twelve well- Book Reviews 101 defined chapters, from his birth on a Rhode bot's. Retaining his rank but not his salary, Island farm in 1751, through the Revolutionary Talbot's next post was Agent for Impressed War, his adventures — and misadventures — in Seamen in the West Indies. The French Revol• landowning, politics, marriage, the Navy, and ution and America's Quasi-war with France re• back to landowning until his death in 1813. vived American naval plans. In June 1799 Each chapter is richly footnoted, drawing on a Talbot took command of the frigate Constitu• variety of historical sources including the Silas tion, accompanied by a promising young lieuten• Talbot Papers and numerous collections of naval ant named Isaac Hull. He immediately set sail to documents. Fowler's research is meticulous, but defend American interests in Hispaniola, re• so effortlessly woven into the story of his princi• named Haiti, under the new revolutionary gov• pal subject that the man and his times blend ernment of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Fowler's nar• easily together. rative incorporates the historical background of Nor does Fowler neglect Talbot's personal all these events clearly and concisely while life. His complex relationships with his wives maintaining the thread of Talbot's story. and children provide a subtext to understanding Obliged to cruise offshore by Constitution's the man and his motives. Ambitious and shrewd, deep draught as well as the delicate political sit• Talbot may have begun life as a bricklayer, but uation in Cap François, Talbot faced the prob• he moved up the social scale by marrying well lem of replenishing food and water for a 500- and encouraging his children to do the same. man crew without entering port. Although no Both a Lieutenant Colonel in the Continen• naval captain had tried it before, Talbot devised tal Army and a Captain in the Continental Navy, a system of resupplying his ship at sea by shut• Talbot was a decorated military hero as well as tling provisions from a storeship to the warship a reasonably successful privateer, not to mention using ships' boats. He perfected the technique a prisoner of war, in his country's cause. In over several operations, keeping the Constitution 1781, after more than a year in prison, Talbot at sea a phenomenal 347 of the 366 days he returned to Rhode Island to find himself a commanded her. By early 1801, Thomas Jeffer• widower with four children and no job! His wise son was President, Talbot was recalled, and by investment of prize money had increased both September he had resigned from the Navy. his wealth and his reputation, but his political The final chapters describe Talbot's later enemies eventually forced him to flee Rhode years in which his commercial and marital in• Island. By 1787, Talbot owned a large property vestments reflected the same ambition and risk- in upper New York State. His new wife was taking as his military and naval career. Fowler's Rebecca Morris, the daughter of a prominent book pays tribute to Silas Talbot, not as a great Philadelphia Quaker merchant, and sister-in-law Revolutionary hero, because he was not, but as of Major General Thomas Mifflin, former Presi• an energetic citizen of the new United States of dent of the Continental Congress. America who not only fought for the new Political turmoil in the United States and nation, but sought to make the best of it. the threat of revolution in France in 1792 enabled Silas to capitalize on his reputation as a Faye Kert war hero and landowner to become a state legis• Ottawa, Ontario lator. Ever ambitious, he was soon lobbying his contacts to obtain command of one of the six Bradley A. Rodgers. Guardian of the Great new frigates authorized by President Washington Lakes: The U.S. Paddle Frigate Michigan. Ann in 1793 to form the core of the United States Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 214 Navy. Although Talbot had never actually cap• pp., illustrations, lines drawings, maps, photo• tained a Continental vessel, or even been to sea graphs, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. in a decade, he was named commander of a 36- US $42.50, cloth; ISBN 0-472-09607. US gun frigate to be constructed at New York. $18.95, paper; ISBN 0-472-06607. Peace with North Africa in 1795 forced President Washington to shelve construction of Brad Rodgers has set out in this study to rescue three of the proposed frigates, including Tal• from obscurity the lengthy career of the USS 102 The Northern Mariner

Michigan, the first iron-hulled vessel in the US sub-theme involves Michigan's role in rescuing Navy. He begins by examining the champions of a succession of vessels of both nationalities from iron shipbuilding, then turning to an examination shipwrecks and strandings, sometimes at the loss of the role of iron vessels like Michigan in the of members of its own crew. There is no effort pre-Civil War Navy. to analyze this role or to compare Michigan's As one of the very few agencies of federal performance with that of other vessels. Its rela• authority on the Northern frontier (the army tionship to the emerging salvage operators in the detachments are conspicuously absent from all 1850s is only hinted at. Somehow, "Michigan as but one of these chapters), the Michigan flexed salvage vessel" is elevated into "Michigan as her muscles, not to intimidate Upper Canadians peace ambassador," a substitution for which the (again generally absent) but to deal with trouble• author provides little evidence. some Americans stealing timber from the public Rodgers has been well served by his pub• domain, nonconformist religious sects,Confeder• lisher with extensive notes, bibliography and ate raiders on the Lakes, labour unrest in the index (hint to the indexer: Rush-Bagot Agree• strategic mining sector, and capturing Fenians ment and Agreement of 1817 are the same retreating from the abortive invasion of Canada. thing). While the promise of a sociology of Rodgers demonstrates, successfully for the most naval life on the lakes comes up a bit short, part, that in each of these incidents, an examin• Rodgers does, I believe, sustain the argument in ation of the rich range of documentation created terms of the Michigan and the Great Lakes that and preserved by the Navy adds new dimensions it would be "impossible to write a history of one to existing studies. without the other." As a prototype the Michigan proved unsuc• cessful, not because of her qualities as a ship Walter Lewis (she was faster, cheaper and more durable than Acton, Ontario the 1850s Niagara-class of wooden Navy pro• pellers) but because subsequent failures with Murray Morgan. Confederate Raider in the iron-hulled vessels left her typed as a "fresh• North Pacific: The Saga of the CSS. Shenan• water fluke." In his claims for the significance doah, 1864-65. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., of her design, Rodgers appears to have focused 1948; WSU Press Reprint Series, Pullman, WA: exclusively on comparisons with other US naval Washington State University Press, 1995. 336 designs. If his assertion that the rectangular body pp., map, illustrations, bibliography. US $19.95, plan "was a great contribution to naval architec• paper; ISBN 0-87422-123-4. ture" (20) was intended as a comment on ship design, it ignores virtually ever other paddle- There could be a number of reasons to criticize wheel design I've seen in Marestier and other this excellent all-around tale of the last of the contemporary sources. Nor are Rodgers' claims Confederate raiders, none of which would do it for her speed out of line with contemporary justice. I could say, from a popular point of commercial paddlewheelers on the Lakes. Her view, that the facts get in the way of a lively sea durability is consistent with the experience of tale, making it overlong and slowing down the the Royal Mail Line steamers which were action. Or, from a scholarly point of view, it exposed every week to the St. Lawrence River might be lamented that there is not more docu• rapids. Rodgers' Michigan overlooks contempor• mentation — a list of ships and dates captured, ary Canadian iron-hulled vessels, and indeed the more background on the individual officers and whole response of the Admiralty to Michigan's other players and what became of them. construction. (HMS Mohawk, the first iron- But, in fact, what struck me most about this hulled vessel on the Lakes, is dismissed in a reprint is that it keeps an even balance between subordinate clause and the Admiralty subsidy of well-researched facts and a sense of the adven• the Magnet is ignored.) ture and destiny of this vessel and its crew that As a ship biography, Rodgers sticks closely makes it both informative and exciting reading to the Michigan, reflecting the general American at the same time — an even-handed mix that bias towards the upper four Lakes. A running achieves better all-around success than many Book Reviews 103 more recent books on the Confederate States Charles Dana Gibson and E. Kay Gibson Navy (CSN). Yes, it marginally annoys me to (comps.). Dictionary of Transports and Combat• have an author put words or thoughts into a ant Vessels, Steam and Sail, Employed by the character which, although they may be entirely Union Army 1861-1868. The Army's Navy Ser• appropriate, have no documentation except the ies; Camden, ME: Ensign Press, 1995. lxv + 348 writer's imagination. But his moments to do so pp., photographs, illustrations, appendix. US are well-chosen: storm scenes, below-decks $43, cloth; ISBN 0-9608996-4-2. conversations, and other moments that add colour and excitement to what might be just a This volume is the reference companion to the collection of journals and reports. Gibson's award-winning study Assault and What ties it all together most of all is the Logistics: Union Army Coastal and River Oper• attention to personal life aboard the Shenandoah, ations, 1861-1866 (see TNM/LMN January 1996, the feeling for what it was like to live through 105). Drawn from the work sheets for that book, the trip for a variety of individuals among her the Gibsons felt that the wealth of information officers and crew - the elation of victory, the on vessels deserved its own publication. Ampli• boredom of endless days upon the Pacific fied by bibliographical comments on sources and wastes, the bleak depression of a long and dan• other essays on admeasurement and government gerous voyage home in defeat. Each individual recording practices, the quartermaster organiz• journal, letter, or press story, most of which ation relative to shipping resources and a guide have been published in greater detail elsewhere, for tracing vessels before and after the US Civil gives a partial view, but here all are spun War, it is no wonder that the Dictionary plus together to give an overview of the totality of Assault and Logistics earned the Gibsons the the experience, along with the intoxicating feel• prestigious North American Society of Oceanic ing of what it was like to be at sea in the period. History prize for the year's most significant For CSN fans, there are nice touches, such contribution to scholarship in naval and/or as poor Lt. Chew's difficulties as a deep-water maritime history. officer. His greatest talent, actually, was prob• The Dictionary is an annotated, cross- ably as a fiddle player — on one occasion the indexed work with operational notes on vessels crew "danced their clothes off to his tunes; on owned, chartered, or otherwise hired by the US another, going downriver aboard the Palmetto government during the Civil War and Recon• State, he was involved in a minstrel show. struction. The entries describe 1,966 steamers of Neither incident is specifically mentioned here, river and ocean classes as well as 2,003 sailing but his social troubles most certainly are — and vessels (often omitted in our modern fascination they were probably more memorable to him! with the war as harbinger of technological ad• The socio-politics of the US Civil War and vance via iron and steam). In addition to hun• its economic aftermaths, so often lingered upon dreds of troop carrier and supply ships, the by other authors, are blessedly absent here and Dictionary includes specialized combat vessels left to other books. This is more of an inside that comprised specialized units like the Ellet tale, similar in feel to Sinclair's personal Ram Fleet and the Mississippi Marine Brigade account of the cruise of the Alabama. The larger on western waters as well as the amphibious implications of what Shenandoah was involved strike forces of Burnside's Coast Division and in are left behind in the headiness and drama of later Graham's Naval Brigade. Each vessel list• just being aboard. ing is accompanied by individualized citations Morgan's style is engaging and very read• indicating the specific sources employed for the able, whether for a CSN buff or just a lover of operational information that is given. sea stories. I came away feeling I had been Attractive photographs and illustrations of there, had personally known the crew, and hull and rigging of sailing vessel types enhance would sail on her again. reader understanding and appreciation. Mostuse- ful to maritime historians will be the comments John Townley and clues to sources. In all, this is a fine Mollusk, Virginia research tool for maritime historical research as 104 The Northern Mariner well as military logistics and transportation friends on the basis of what they could do to generally. But, above and beyond, it is fun promote his career, and he blatantly exploited perusing the entries — the vessel titles, size, and President Abraham Lincoln's good opinion to employment illustrate well this neglected facet undercut the authority of Secretary of the Navy of our understanding of nineteenth-century war. Gideon Welles and advance himself over other It was more than fighting men or even railroads able officers. By the time of his 1865 second that preserved the Union. Rather, boats plus marriage to widow Madeleine Vinton Goddard, manpower on the waterways as well as prodi• Dahlgren had seemingly decided that it was as gious effort by land supply vehicles provided the easy to love a rich woman as one of moderate sinews of effort. Taken and used together, means; the financial and status security which Assault and Logistics and the Dictionary drive the marriage brought was perhaps the only dis• home the point. tant glimpse of inner serenity that life granted this tormented man. Such is the story, drawn Benjamin Franklin Cooling from Dahlgren's immense personal archive, that Chevy Chase, Maryland Robert Schneller tells in his excellent new bio• graphy, A Quest for Glory. Robert J. Schneller, Jr.. A Quest for Glory: A The book is as much a study of Dahlgren's Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren. personality, its formidable strengths and its Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996. xvii + crippling limitations, as it is the story of Dahl• 452 pp., illustrations, figures, photographs, gren's technical accomplishments. Other review• maps, notes, bibliography, index. US $37.95, ers will comment on Schneller's study of Dahl• Cdn $48.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-762-7. Cana• gren the ordnance innovator; the psychological dian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Cathar• theme of A Quest for Glory deserves evaluation ines, ON. as well. Schneller does a fine job of describing the mindset of an era which made John Dahl• Driven by an intense desire to be a famous man, gren's life-defining effort to "win glory and John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren (1809-1870) achieve immortal fame" (9) as a naval officer, became one of the nineteenth-century United and preferably as a combat leader, a praise• States Navy's most technologically proficient worthy human endeavour. But to identify the and creative officers. His chosen field of endea• strands in then-contemporary thought which vour was naval ordnance, and the bottle-shaped valorized fame-seeking behaviour is not to gun which bears his name and which for a time explain why this particular man, John A. Dahl• made the United States a world leader in the gren, needed to pursue that goal. Adult behav• production of powerful and reliable naval guns iour has its roots in childhood experience; is instantly recognized by those with even a Schneller's book, in common with most naval casual interest in the American Civil War. But biography, has too little to say about its sub• John Dahlgren's desire for fame was a ravenous ject's formative years. Understanding the origins psychic tapeworm that could never be satisfied. of behaviour is vital in the present instance, Not content with outstanding technical achieve• because Dahlgren's obsessive pursuit of fame ments, Dahlgren sought greater fame as a Civil was often as counterproductive as it was enabl• War combat leader, only to find himself frus• ing in his career. Good clues to Dahlgren's adult trated in that search through his failure to cap• actions lie in Schneller's observation that, ture Charleston, South Carolina, by assault. A "physically and financially, the Dahlgren family creative individual, Dahlgren shared that person• lived on the fringe of Philadelphia's socio-eco• ality type's typical dislike of routine administra• nomic elite" (4) and in the genteel poverty to tion; he was neither notably successful nor which Dahlgren's father's free-spending gener• happy in such assignments when they came his osity condemned the family when he died pre• way, particularly his tours as chief of the Navy maturely in 1824. Were it explored more fully, Department's Bureau of Ordnance. Dahlgren the the relationship between demanding Bernhard human being displayed some less-than-admirable Ullrik Dahlgren the father and striving John traits. He was far from subtle in picking his Dahlgren the son might yield rich insights. Book Reviews 105

There, one suspects, may be a key to later inner thread that is paramount to any effective study conflicts between John Dahlgren the romantic of maritime history, rivalries and the capacity of husband and would-be good parent of his first a nation to secure its own power resources while marriage and John Dahlgren the relentless pur• concurrently influencing and securing their suer of fame. Even if a harder-pressed search respective commercial and insular security and failed to turn up additional archival materials on commercial links. This absolute is the relation• Bernhard Dahlgren and his family, his son left ship of geography, especially the pivotal road• so large a body of revealing diaries and other steads and natural choke-points throughout the personal papers that richer and more subtle in• world which have either released or confined the sights into the formation of his personality might capacity of certain powers to achieve the fore• have been teased from the texts than Schneller most objective of power projection and which has done. Perhaps it is too much to hope for a can withstand and prevail against individual or naval equivalent of Diane Middlebrook's Anne collective challenges by maritime adversaries. Sexton (1991). Be that as it may, A Quest for The section on theory presents a valuable Glory takes a well deserved place near the front blend of comparisons between the concepts of of the class among recent biographies of nine• maritime power, empire building and preemptive teenth-century US naval officers. acquisition of zones of sovereignty or suzerainty, which all served to ignite the initial collisions Christopher McKee contributing to World War I and then fuelled the Grinnell, Iowa subsequent ambitions and engagements of the next generation of naval rivals in World War II. Hervé Coutau-Bégarie (éd.). La lutte pour Each paper contains splendid historical examples l'empire de la mer: Histoire et géostratégie and incorporates the scholarship and published maritimes. Paris: Institut de stratégie comparée, research of other observers of the ongoing 1995 [École pratique des Hautes Études, drama, allowing for a broader examination in Sciences historiques et philologiques, Sorbonne - some respects of particular models in the section Escalier E, 45-47, rue des Écoles, 75005 Paris]. on history. Though most of this section is allo• 388 pp., tables, maps, figures. 195 FFr, paper; cated to a broad and deep assessment of the ISBN 2-7178-2985-7. Athenian example, additional focus is paid to France, Great Britain, the United States and This is both a trenchant and compelling collec• Japan, the latter in a fresh and smooth-flowing tion of essays by the editor as well as Alain Bru, overview of contrasting strategies during the James Cable, François Caron, Eric Denece, great Pacific War of 1941-1945. Punctuated with Didier Jean, Jean-Claude Josselin, Colin Gray, valid examples of the hazards of both overreach Jean-Baptiste Margeride, Jean Pages and André and static positioning, this essay encapsulates the Vigarie. Separately and in composite, the articles arguments offered earlier in the collection and address the interconnection of naval doctrine, serves as a potent reminder of the durability of strategies, techniques and geopolitical circum• geography as a significant and occasionally the stance to the naval history, commerce and war• ultimate determinant of naval dominance, fare of maritime powers from the rise of Athens whether in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, or to the onset of the "Cold War" confrontation the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. between the West and the Soviet bloc in the The final section carries considerations of 1970s to the Falklands crisis in the mid 1980s. geography and maritime strategy into the recent The book is conveniently and effectively past, and in a precise and selective manner the compartmentalized into three logical segments- reader gains a quick understanding of the motiv• theory, history and geopolitical strategy, the last ations underlying Soviet naval policy in Asia in using the Pacific Ocean as the clinical focus. the era of the Vietnam War and the threats that The reader will not only find the individual even now in the aftermath of the collapse of the essays both informative and intriguing, but will USSR confront Southeast Asia, Japan and the discover that throughout these contributions, adjacent zones. One highly detailed study of the each author turns his analysis to a common passages and straits of the region clarifies, at 106 The Northern Mariner

least in this example, the perils to be anticipated more to provide analytical guidelines in his for the economies of the entire Pacific Rim if opening paper. His basic contention, which such were constricted and denied. In the absence seems to be that British naval history must be of any immediate threat one can only presume placed in a broader imperial and maritime that a belligerent and expansive Communist framework, is unexceptionable enough and hard• China as a future menace is implied. ly worth the rather combative tone of the piece. Documentation throughout the book is solid, Schurman takes swipes at Michael Howard and reflecting not only traditional but revisionist Paul Kennedy, especially the latter, who prob• scholarship. Each essay provides an abundance ably would not recognise either the description of sources and while there is no index the essays of himself as a "naval historian" or that of his are structured neatly. Helpful maps supplement thesis in what presumably is The Rise and Fall some of the offerings. A splendid concluding of British Naval Mastery but which is quoted essay by James Cable deftly ties together the mysteriously as The Struggle For British Naval broad horizon and the specific foregrounds of Mastery. There are also some dismissive com• each writer, all of whom have avoided the ments on "nuts and bolts" naval history and a deluge of minutia which so frequently hampers supposed undue emphasis on operations by naval presentations of this type. Moreover, the editor writers which take no account of the excellent has maintained the clarity of focus as intended. work of more recent naval historians who take One could wish for additional emphasis on the an even broader view than that supported by the Atlantic and Caribbean domains which reflect in distinguished professor. Sadly this rather odd microcosm the theories and strategies articulated chapter is summed up by its footnotes which by the authors of several of the pieces in this contain not a single reference to a work of work. However, perhaps such studies await recent naval scholarship and which can do no another gathering of these participants in this better than cite a book published in 1936 for a most rewarding and timely arena. description of the technological developments of the nineteenth century. Calvin W. Hines Professors Till and Hattendorf next examine Nacogdoches, Texas Sir Julian Corbett and Alfred Thayer Mahan and their national strategic legacies. Both are the Keith Neilson and Elizabeth Jane Errington highly competent papers one would expect. Till (eds.). Navies and Global Defense: Theories and is fully up to speed with recent secondary work Strategies. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 1995. ix but his paper would have been better had he fol• + 238 pp., tables, selected bibliography, index. lowed up some of the leads in the Corbett US $55, cloth; ISBN 0-275-94898-6. papers over the road in the National Maritime Museum that I opened up in my introduction to This book is the collected papers of the Twenti• the latest edition of Some Principles of Maritime eth Military History Symposium held at Kings• Strategy. John Hattendorf is the editor of the ton in 1994. The conference organisers gathered recent synthesis of Mahan in the same series and a small selection of naval historians and strat• for the time being his summary of Mahan's egists to give their views on the theoretical and ideas and impact could not be bettered, though empirical development of naval power from things will not be quite the same again after 1856 in the United Kingdom's case and 1889 in publication of Professor Sumida's forthcoming that of the United States. This rather imprecise revisionist work on the great man. starting point is a function of a general intellec• The strengths of contemporary British naval tual confusion about the book taken as a whole. history are demonstrated by papers by Andrew The authors have very different views on the Lambert and Andrew Gordon which between basic themes the book is trying to explore and them look at the Royal Navy from 1856 to 1914 there is no attempt to take an analytical rather and 1918-45. Lambert's stimulating paper than descriptive view of the papers as a whole clearly took the Canadians by surprise; the in the editors' introduction. editors call it "contentious and aggressive" Don Schurman might have helped a little which is not really true. It merely reflects the Book Reviews 107 best available modern research and analysis. The V.E. Tarrant. Jutland: The German Perspective. same is true of Gordon's piece, although the A New View of the Great Battle, 31 May 1916. latter is predictably stronger on the period before Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995. 318 pp., 1939 than after it. In between David French tables, figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, provides a strategically integrated account of the index. US $32.95, Cdn $40.95, cloth; ISBN 1- war of 1914-18 that is elegant and interesting 55750-408-3. Canadian distributor, Vanwell but not as up to speed with the latest research as Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. the papers by the two maritime specialists. The two American papers covering the On 31 May, 1916, the long-awaited confronta• same period are a little less satisfying still. Ken tion between the Royal and Imperial German Hagan elegantly summarises the relevant sec• Navies took place. The Battle of Jutland was the tions of his full length revisionist history of This culmination of the Edwardian naval race, and People's Navy, a source Nathan Miller uses the zenith of the Dreadnought battleship. How• heavily in his summary of the period 1922-45. ever, Jutland was no second Trafalgar. The less The limited source base displayed in the latter than stellar British performance, combined with paper's footnotes diminish its authority some• the plain fact that they suffered greater losses what. than the out-numbered Germans, has caused the Oddly there was no paper on the Royal spilling of more ink than perhaps any other Navy since 1945, which is a pity as the huge naval action. V.E. Tarrant has tossed yet another adjustments made the RN in the half century book onto the pile, nicely timed with the eight• since 1945 would have cast significant light on ieth anniversary of the battle. the conference's themes. What we have is a con• The book opens with a succinct summary of sideration of the role of sea power in the Cold the pre-1914 naval build-up. Technical particu• War from the perspective of the US Navy. My lars such as the deficient British armour-piercing colleague Professor Gray in a typically sceptical projectiles and the difference between the Ger• and balanced account makes some useful points man and RN range-finding techniques are des• about the impossibility of determining precisely cribed, but some additional background informa• the contribution sea power can make to the tion could have been included. Not mentioned is favourable conclusion of a conflict. the British superiority in fire control "prediction" The conference concluded with a forward machinery or the fact that stereoscopic range- look at the "Future of Sea Power", a task finders, under action conditions, did not hold a strangely not given to a another strategist like clear-cut advantage over the RN's co-incidence Professor Gray but to historian Holger Herwig. method. That being said, Tarrant does explain Hardly surprisingly, the chapter is more a the differing requirements behind each navy's retrospective on what had gone before rather final design compromises, and why the German than an attempt to come to grips with the major vessels were, on a ship-by-ship basis, superior to issues of the current and future maritime stra• their British equivalents. tegic scene, but then it was probably not meant The first few chapters provide the usual to be such a serious enterprise. coverage of the early naval endeavours, and the The reader is left with the feeling that impact of what were then novel conditions of although the conference allowed much good maritime warfare. Not only the British Room work to be aired it did not do as much as it 40, but the Germans at Neumiinster, had the could have done to live up to its title. A short (occasional) ability to read each other's radio book of ten chapters on this subject could have traffic. The tactical and strategic impact of this been an important contribution both to recent signals intelligence is adequately handled. history and maritime strategy. Alas all we have The meat of the book deals with the battle here is yet another conference symposium itself — the Battle of the Skagerrak as it is curate's egg. known in Germany. It is very much the standard account, the narration emphasising the German Eric Grove viewpoint. There are no surprises, but experts Hull, England may quibble with some of the points Tarrant 108 The Northern Mariner

raises. For example, he blames Barham instead William J. Ruhe. Slow Dance to Pearl Harbor: of Beatty's signals staff for missing the signal at A Tin Can Ensign in Prewar America. London the start of the "Run to the North." All the & Washington: Brassey's, 1995. xiii + 210 pp. highlights are certainly covered: Jellicoe's US $23.95, Cdn $34.95, cloth; ISBN 1-57488- deployment into line-of-battle is discussed (the 020-9. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, results of a hypothetical "starboard wing" de• St. Catharines, ON. ployment even rates a map), though there is little discussion of the "centre-column" option, Many books describe the professional coming of bruited about by some writers. The 32-point turn age of a naval officer. Few, however, do so as of Beatty's battlecruisers is described, but with• well or in as entertaining a fashion as William out mention of the ensuing post-war altercation. Ruhe's Slow Dance to Pearl Harbor. Still fewer Good data are provided in the appendices: examine this metamorphosis in a peacetime the fleet lists include destroyers on both sides navy. These qualities make this book well worth (something not always found); shells fired/hits reading. obtained are tabulated, though it would seem Slow Dance to Pearl Harbor covers the ten- that only German sources were used, even to month period from August 1940 to June 1941 record the hits on British ships. There is a sum• when Ruhe served as an ensign in the destroyer mary of the more significant German signals. USS Roe. This was an interesting and busy time The many maps are clear and easy to fol• for a "typical" American destroyer. Although not low, albeit sometimes badly placed. There is at war, Roe was certainly on the periphery of what appears to be smoke on certain maps — war and, among other activities, was a partici• whether for artistic effect or based on actual pant in the transfer of US Navy four-stackers to observation, cannot be determined. The lines the British at Halifax, the Neutrality Patrol in drawings of the major ship classes are a nice the Caribbean and fleet exercises in the Pacific. touch (no scale given, unfortunately), but they Ruhe, who kept a detailed journal, describes do bear a resemblance to those in Siegfried a ship, navy and society on a slow dance to war. Breyer's Battleships and Battle Cruisers 1905- He is an excellent and discerning observer, and 1970. Several illustrate features that only the fact that he was an enthusiastic amateur art• appeared post-Jutland, such as the flying-off ist helps him create intriguing word pictures of platforms on HMS Lion. Without a doubt, the the ports, people and practices he encounters. book could also have benefitted by some photo• Like Canadian naval officers of the interwar graphs. period, US Navy officers commonly received in• The significance of this book, according to vitations to the best mansions and country clubs, the publisher, is the coverage from the German even though they had little money themselves. point-of-view. In that regard, the book does live Ruhe — an enthusiastic bachelor — describes well up to the claims on the dust jacket. And yet, this the interaction between naval professionals and reviewer can give it only a passing grade. While the high society debutantes of locales like all the details are there for the Jutland "novice," Newport, Norfolk and Honolulu. On the other the specialist will be disappointed. The sources hand, wartime Halifax was a disappointment, are for the most part commonly found. One "gray and dreary. Soldiers and sailors every• would expect much discussion and interpretation where, and pairs of plain, unattractive girls of Scheer's turn towards the British Grand Fleet walked up and down the streets looking for a — and Tarrant relies entirely on Scheer's letter pick-up." to the Kaiser and the German Official History. The most valuable and intriguing parts of There is no interpretation by the author at all of the book deal with the tempestuous relationship this key event. In short, this is a good, readable between the young, brash Ensign Ruhe — just account of the Battle of Jutland, but not much one year out of Annapolis — and Lieutenant more than that. Commander Richard H. Scruggs, Roe's captain. A "sundowner," Scruggs was a strict disciplinar• William Schleihauf ian with a mean streak who rode his wardroom Pierrefonds, Québec hard. Advised by his previous superior that Book Reviews 109 destroyers were the best training ground for begins with a brief introduction to the develop• young officers, Ruhe was disappointed to find ment and eclipse of cruiser fleets before pro• himself serving under a tyrannical nit-picking ceeding to list ships by nationality and class. martinet who demanded perfection from his The work claims to describe all the cruisers officers, though he was far from perfect himself. extant, completed or laid down during the period Exacerbating the situation was the routine of a 1939-1945 by all the nations of the world. There peacetime navy that was more concerned with are certainly no obvious exclusions. Each class paper work and spit-and-polish than preparing receives attention as to origins of design, specifi• for war. After numerous run-ins with the CO, cations, numbers built, and ultimate fate. These Ruhe applied for transfer to the submarine descriptions are generally accompanied by line service and was accepted, despite poor fitness diagrams and pictures. reports from Scruggs. Canada's modest war-time cruiser force It was only upon reflection after the war gets its due. The origins and design of HMCS that Ruhe saw that Scruggs had prepared him Uganda and HMCS Ontario are described well. well for his war service in submarines, which he However, there is appreciable confusion in the described in War in the Boats (Brassey's, 1994). description of the manning crisis which forced He realized that as Roe and the United States Uganda to retreat from the Pacific War and danced slowly towards the abyss of war, return to Canada. The ship took part in actions Scruggs, while maintaining his cruel demeanour, both before and after the majority of the ship's had subtly shifted concentration from spit-and- company voted to leave the war. The confusion polish and administration to evolutions and drills is sufficient to call into question all the obscure that readied the ship and crew for war. Ruhe detail contained within this work. also discovered that all the officers who served The book is attractive as a general reference with him under Scruggs had gone on to success• work but its lack of scholarly devices renders its ful naval careers. All who survived the war ultimate worth questionable. One must ask what made Captain or better; Scruggs himself was the prospective audience of the book may be. promoted Rear Admiral and had a distinguished Historians, modellers, veterans and buffs spring war career. In the end Ruhe concludes that to mind, but as a global reference this work although he would never follow Scruggs' style gives too little attention to the major navies in of leadership to the letter, his captain had made which the majority of the latter three groups him a more professional naval officer. tend to be most interested, e.g. German, British, In short, this is a good entertaining read Japanese and American navies. While this work that is recommended for anyone interested in should find a large institutional audience there is leadership and the human side of naval affairs. little else to say of its merits. If the arcane issue of World War II cruisers stirs your interest, this Michael Whitby is a fine place to start, but it cannot be called a Almonte, Ontario definitive account. The fine bibliography in• cluded in this work points direction to those. M.J. Whitley. Cruisers of World War Two: An International Encyclopedia. Annapolis: Naval Michael A. Hennessy Institute Press, 1996. 288 pp., photographs, Kingston, Ontario figures, bibliography, index. US $49.95, Cdn $69.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-141-6. Canadian John Caldecott Littler. Sea Fever. Victoria, BC: distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, Kiwi Publications, 1995. 334 pp., illustrations, ON. photographs, index. $28, paper; ISBN 0- 9680370-0-3. Available from: "SeaFever," 1720 The author of several reference works on the Rockland Avenue, Victoria, British Columbia German navy and of Destroyers of World War V8S 1W8 for $34.50, GST & postage included. Two, M.J. Whitley has now produced a hand• some reference to the world's cruiser fleets of Sailors who write their memoirs are often a World War II. On par for its ilk, this reference boon to historians, and since a sailor's life is 110 The Northern Mariner seldom dull, a well-written memoir is likely to tance he was dashing and debonair. At the closer be a good read. Thanks largely to the careful view afforded by his writing, strong English editing of Jan Drent, Sea Fever meets both ex• characteristics reveal themselves, in the affection pectations. with which he remembers Shropshire and quotes It is a coincidence that, in 1947, this A.E. Housman, dismay at damage to the English reviewer was one of many cadets sent for train• countryside, and dare I say the effortless super• ing in Halifax with the University Naval Train• iority that he manages to display in every kind ing Division when HMCS Micmac, under John of circumstance. Make no mistake, Littler looks Littler's command, collided with the merchant upon Canada and Canadians with enormous af• ship Yarmouth County in the Halifax harbour fection, but his world view is European rather approaches. It was a horrifying accident, result• than North American, and it smacks more of the ing in several deaths, and we wondered at the 1930s than the 1990s. The formative influences time why a destroyer should be steaming at such of the Brocklebank Line are to be seen in his high speed in fog. The Micmac disaster was one concern for good manners, hard work, faultless of the classic examples of a "radar assisted" attire, professional amour propre. His fury in collision, something that naval officers, those of response to an escort commander's criticism of us in the navigation trade especially, endeav• his seamanship, his delight in naval ceremony, oured to avoid at all costs. "There but for the the ability to see the humour of a situation even grace of God...." Littler's explanation of the amid the disasters and atrocities of the Japanese event, undoubtedly a painful recollection, is invasion of China, mark him as a sailor of the convincing. One hopes it has finally exorcised old school, if there is such a thing. any demons that remained. While serving as assistant navigator in If they have done nothing else, the reminis• HMS Belfast during the Normandy landings in cences of this supremely competent naval officer 1944, he recollects with admiration, (222) "the will put that unhappy episode in proper perspec• Commander set a very high standard....our tive. "Bred to the sea," he joined a training ship boiled shirts and stiff collars were sent to a of the Brocklebank Line in 1927, and by the age Manchester firm which did an amazing job of 23, in 1934, was serving as a Second Officer postal laundry; suffice it to say, I never had to with the Jardine Matheson Line on the China wear a shirt or collar twice...." Later in the same Coast. He received his Master's Ticket at the paragraph we read of the devastation brought age of 26, and was Chief Officer in five ships down upon the city of Caen. This is seen in plying between China and India and on the terms of reprisal for the bombing of England: Yangtze River between 1937 and 1940. He then clearly the ships' officers had no idea of the allowed himself to be recruited into the RCNR suffering that their bombardment caused the by the Canadian Trade Commissioner at Hong citizens of Caen, who were their allies. Stan• Kong, commanded the corvette Brandon on dards were everything. Later in his career he North Atlantic convoys with marked efficiency, considered the RCN's disposal of the training conducted sea training on the east coast (about cruiser Ontario, his last seagoing command, as which he has important insights), and after serv• a fatal error. It may be some comfort to him to ing in an RN cruiser, commissioned HMCS know that his passionate opposition to that deci• Uganda as her first Navigating Officer. In 1945 sion is preserved in the historical archives of the the ship's company, already embroiled in the Department of National Defence. Like this book thick of the fighting in the Pacific, rejected the it is readable, persuasive, and a trifle out of step option of volunteering for service in that theatre. with the times. For those reasons alone, and es• He has useful comments on this event as well. pecially for the wonderful picture of life in the His postwar naval career, after he had trans• Brocklebank and Jardine Matheson Lines before ferred to the RCN, was perhaps less exotic than World War II, Sea Fever deserves a wide his China Coast experiences, but he served readership. Highly recommended. Canada with distinction for another seventeen years. W.A.B. Douglas To those of us who knew Littler at a dis• Ottawa, Ontario Book Reviews 111

Robert G. Halford. The Unknown Navy: was "padded" with instruction in useless skills. Canada's World War II Merchant Navy. St. Perhaps this is true, but might it also have been Catharines, ON: Vanwell Publishers, 1995. x + possible that training periods were adjusted as 272, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliogra• demand for seamen fluctuated? In a recent phy, index. $29.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55125-016-0. collection of essays on the Battle of the Atlantic {To Die Gallantly), Joseph F. Meany, Jr. claims Like the rusty tramps that crowded the world's that this was the case at the United States Mari• sea lanes a half-century ago, The Unknown Navy time Commission's training school at carries a mixed cargo and calls at many ports. Sheepshead Bay, New York, where courses Much of Robert Halford's book presents a com• varied in length anywhere from six to eighteen petent historical overview of Canada's merchant weeks. Such a question may seem irrelevant to marine, supplemented by two shorter sections of the average reader, but it nevertheless illustrates personal recollections, one autobiographical and the lack of a contextual framework informing the other detailing the experiences of other much of the writing on this subject. former matelots "in their own words." Of par• The episodic structure of Halford's later ticular interest is Halford's account of his time chapters reinforces this lack of direction and in at the St. Margaret's Bay Sea Training school any event covers essentially the same ground, in near Hubbards, Nova Scotia. Irreverent to a a less satisfying way, as Mike Parker's Running fault, his perspective is one that only a trainee the Gauntlet. The Parker book remains far and could give, and the approach is reminiscent of away the best single volume on Canadian mer• William H. Pugsley's trenchant exposés of the chant seamen during World War II. However Royal Canadian Navy, Sailor Remember and neither it nor The Unknown Navy definitively Saints, Devils and Ordinary Seamen. It is doubt• captures the interplay between seamen, the ful that the "boys' school atmosphere" described government, the navy and - most neglected and by Halford was quite the effect that government most significant of all — shipowners, within the authorities at the time had intended, so this multi-faceted convoy system. That alone is chapter adds insight as well as hilarity to the worthy of closer attention, steering clear of narrative. lamentations about a lost seafaring tradition or The author's singular perspective, unfortu• condemnations of Cold War paranoia. From the nately, highlights a major weakness of the book. British side of the pond, Tony Lane's book The Historians and students of Canada's maritime Merchant Seaman's War sets a standard that we history will find the research thin, and the colonials would do well to emulate. footnotes inadequate. This becomes apparent The responsible critic must, of course, early on in Chapter One, where, over the course emphasize what a book is rather than complain of three pages, the unsinkable Sam Cunard and about what it is not. In style and tone, The family receive due recognition, whereas the Unknown Navy falls somewhere between the source of all this engrossing reportage remains "Salty Dips" genre popularized by James Lamb, submerged. Perusing the notes is frustrating — Hal Lawrence and others, and the missionary eventually one deduces that the likely source for tract bemoaning Canada's collective indifference the Cunard saga is a single piece published in to the shipping industry in general and merchant the house organ of the National Archives. seamen in particular. S.C. Heal's 1992 book Further investigation into the book's end-pages Conceived in War, Born in Peace and Jim suggests confusion as to what purpose a footnote Green's Against the Tide belong to the latter should serve — citation or explication? The category. For his chapter on the Canadian author clearly favours the latter, and the curious- Seaman's Union, Halford relies rather too minded suffer for it. heavily on Green, while Heal's work is not Autobiographers regularly fall into the trap mentioned at all, although the two authors share of assuming that personal experience is an similar views and agree in their summary con• adequate substitute for documentary research. clusion, to wit: "Within a few years peacetime Halford concludes, for example, that his thirteen [shipping]...economics and the Canadian Gov• weeks at St. Margaret's Bay in the fall of 1943 ernment's union-busting reaction to an industry- 112 The Northern Mariner wide strike...combined effectively to sink what this project should be thrown in the brig for not was left of the war-created Canadian Merchant insisting on a glossary. Navy, something that U-boats and storms at sea Had it been aimed at a wider audience, The had been unable to do." (Halford, pp. ix-x) This Unknown Navy could have won new adherents is an old debate and Halford contributes little to as well as preach to the converted. Among those it, except for adding the pragmatic Vancouver who already know something of this story, lawyer J.V. Clyne to the list of red-baiters and however, it deserves to be well-received. And I shortsighted bureaucrats who allegedly dis• do hope I am wrong about the second printing. mantled Canada's deep-sea merchant fleet. Whatever the seaborne equivalent to tilting Jay White at windmills is, Robert Halford and others who Bellingham, Washington broach this subject may be doing it. From the majoritarian point of view, Canada is and always Brendan A. Maher. A Passage to Sword Beach: has been a freshwater country. This was made Minesweeping in the Royal Navy. Annapolis: painfully clear during the war, when naval Naval Institute Press, 1996. xv + 246 pp., maps, headquarters was located in the "canoe-minded photographs, appendices, index. US $28.95, Cdn capital," as one Halifax-based naval officer once $40.50, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-572-1. Canadian described Ottawa. Things have nit changed distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, much in the interim; devotees of nautical lore ON. defend a lonely outpost against the onslaught of a landlubber culture. Through the preservation Naval histories after World War II fall into of Liberty ships as floating museums on both several categories, distinguished by time. First coasts, American merchant fleet veterans have, came the factual, semi-official histories, accurate to their credit, been more successful in promot• but often incomplete. Then came a series of "I ing public awareness of their wartime contribu• was there" or individual ship's histories, fol• tion, yet they too complain about lack of recog• lowed by examinations of increasingly smaller nition — and America built 2,700 Libertys to and sometimes obscure organizations, such as Canada's 176 Parks. The campaign to preserve frogmen, beach commandos, and so on. Lately a Park steamship as a fitting monument to there have appeared the exposés whereby all Canada's Merchant Navy should go full ahead — leaders had feet of clay, most military decisions quixotic though it may be, it is long overdue. were incredibly stupid, and the authors cannot Despite its flaws, The Unknown Navy will fathom why perfectly obvious (to them) clues of surely find its way into the hands of Canadian enemy reaction were not countered. Today we nautical history buffs, although it is unlikely that are beginning to get two very diverse branches there are sufficient numbers of them to warrant of the historical tree: the carefully researched a second printing. This sad fact brings me to analytical study of why decisions were made and another observation. The author expects that why events occurred as they did; and the per• readers will know what a "Lloyd's bell ringer" sonal narratives, written at leisure by those now or a "windlass" means. In just a few paragraphs retired, often at the behest of wife, family or of an otherwise riveting first-hand brush with cohorts. A Passage to Sword Beach is one of German weaponry ("Torpedoes, Mines and these latter. Other Hazards of War"), the speaker refers to Using his midshipman's journal and a the "wheelhouse," a "gyro repeat," a "stringer diary he kept almost throughout, Brendan Maher plate," the "foremast," "brake bands," and a tells with some skill his story from joining the "monkey island." It is all well and good to fuel RNVR as a seaman in February 1937 as a lieut• the appetite for nostalgia among those who enant. Apart from a brief training period while experienced the war, but is not the education of an Ordinary Seaman in a cruiser, his whole war the young a sensible strategy for books of this experience was in minesweepers — first in an kind? How else will these fateful events and the Algerine fleet 'sweeper, than as navigator and people who lived them earn a place in the 1st Lieutenant in a small Fairmile motor launch annals of posterity? Whoever acted as editor on inshore sweeper off the coasts of Normandy and Book Reviews 113

Holland. His was one of the leading inshore J. Valerio Borghese (James Cleugh, trans.; Paolo sweeping craft off the northeast British and E. Coletta, intro.). Sea Devils: Italian Navy Canadian beaches on the morning of D-Day, Commandos in World War II. London, 1952; surviving that experience with no more than "Classicsof Naval Literature," Annapolis: Naval nearby enemy shells fired in their direction. Institute Press, 1995. xix + 264 pp., photo• Shortly thereafter he was badly wounded in the graphs, illustrations, maps, appendix. US face when a hand grenade, dropped via a Rube $32.95,, Cdn $45.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-072- Goldberg pipe contraption to try to detonate X. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. "oyster" pressure mines, exploded prematurely Catharines, ON. on deck. He recovered after many skin grafts and painful jaw operations, and served out his Although Italy entered the war with a fleet time in various barracks jobs. which was comparable to British forces in the Maher is a well educated man, and his story Mediterranean, the Regia Marina Italiana never unfolds in a smoothly constructed narrative. appeared to measure up to the Royal Navy. In Through the use of extensive extracts from his spite of their own courage, Italian seamen were journal, which he kept until he was promoted to seriously hampered in their efforts by political, Sub Lieutenant, and rather too often duplicated strategic, operational and material factors. Under by similar quotations from a diary, one gets a such circumstances, it was not surprising that the clear impression of life as a trainee seaman and Regia Marina looked to special weapons and very junior officer. But this portion is really tactics to augment inexpensively their offensive more for family than general interest. It is when capability. he gets into the detail of minesweeping arrange• The men of the special forces displayed ments and life in a large sweeper, then in a very extraordinary courage. They fought alone or in small one (about sixty per cent of the book), pairs, under physically gruelling conditions, that there is more for the naval reader. The tale knowing that even success would likely be also flows more satisfactorily when he simply rewarded with capture or death — death which tells the story and his impressions of his fellow might come from the enemy, the weather, officers and events than when he copies out the equipment failure or simple exhaustion. notes of a 19-year-old made at the time. It is, Borghese noted that, "in a word, the proceedings however, a bit difficult to determine where this were exactly the opposite of what the phrase book is aimed. It has rather much technical 'assault craft' might be supposed to mean; there detail for the non-naval civilian, yet it is rather was nothing in the nature of making a dash, too simple for the old hand, even with detailed nothing was to be left to chance, all impulsive• sketches of minesweeping arrangement and a ness was to be held in check; on the contrary, normal naval glossary. There are one or two everything was to be coolly calculated and every errors — the Naval hymn is not "O God, our technical and ingenious resource was to be help in ages past," but rather "Eternal Father..." exploited to the fullest extent possible." Italian (75) However, these have little bearing on the special forces sank or damaged 202,762 tons of tale and do not detract. Maher lightens the way Allied shipping, including the battleships HMS with many anecdotes of service life and follies Valiant and Queen Elizabeth, in operations that will be familiar and bring a knowing smile which ranged from Gibraltar to the Crimea. to naval hands. His experience as a Mid, a Sub Morale remained high throughout the war and and a junior Lieutenant were common to many, the flotilla's achievements were out of propor• yet, with his war experience, it deserves to be tion to the resources expended. recorded, and his tale is a useful and unusual Sea Devils chronicles the history of the addition to the well rounded naval library, not Tenth Light Flotilla and its antecedents. In 1918, covered by others. a team had successfully mined an Austrian dreadnought in Pola (now Pula, Croatia) har• Fraser M. McK.ee bour. As Italy embroiled itself in East Africa, Markdale, Ontario individual naval officers began to develop new special weapons and tactics. These initiatives 114 The Northern Mariner

were cooly received until the Regia Marina John A. Lorelli. To Foreign Shores: U.S. Am• began to realize that war with Great Britain was phibious Operations in World War II. Anna• inevitable. Surface weapons included explosive polis: Naval Institute Press, 1995. xix + 362 pp., motorboats and torpedo carrying assault motor- photographs, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliogra• boats, while manned torpedoes, miniature sub• phy, index. US $38.95, Cdn $54.50, cloth; ISBN marines and assault swimmers comprised the 1-55750-520-9. Canadian distributor, Vanwell underwater arsenal. With the formation of the Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. Tenth Light Flotilla in 1941, training, R&D, support and operations for the special forces "The difference between a river crossing...and a were brought under a single command. landing from the ocean is that the failure of a Prince Valerio Borghese was a fiercely river crossing is a reverse, while the failure of a patriotic nationalist who was uncritical of landing...is a catastrophe." So did US Army Mussolini but critical of the military high com• Chief of Staff General George Marshall explain mand. He believed that the Italian armed forces the subtleties of amphibious warfare to Joseph were poorly organized, badly coordinated and Stalin late in 1943. Stalin had chided the West• lacking in strategic direction. In his view, the ern Allies for their procrastination in opening a Tenth was one of the few units to undertake meaningful second front against Hitler. Yet effective offensive action. In one sense, and having been driven from the Continent in 1940, perhaps not surprisingly, Sea Devils is a some• they had first to breech the Germans' vaunted what bombastic eulogy of his undeniably Atlantic Wall to establish a toehold for large- intrepid comrades. If this was where it ended, scale manoeuvre warfare. An entire army — half the book would be of only passing interest. a million men and all their weapons and equip• Fortunately, Borghese was also a competent ment — had somehow to be transported across submarine commander who served with the the treacherous English Channel under the nose special forces throughout most of the war, of a waiting enemy. Contemporaneous with eventually rising to command the Tenth Light Operation Overlord (codename for the eventual Flotilla. He wrote objectively and authoritatively assault on Normandy), on the other side of the globe Operation Forager (the latest step in the about all aspects of recruiting, selection, training Americans' island-hopping campaign in the Pac• and deployment of the Tenth. Not only did he ific) would establish US long range bombers on give an exact appreciation of the factors that the Marianas Islands, within reach of the Japan• contributed to the success of the Flotilla but he ese homeland for the first time. Marshall con• also was entirely pragmatic about the strengths cluded with the admission, "Before the...war I and weaknesses of special forces and how much had never heard of any landing craft except a of a contribution they could have made to the rubber boat. Now I think about little else." Axis war effort. Fifty years after it was written, Sea Devils still contains important truths for As Lorelli vividly demonstrates, amphibious those who might see such forces as an inexpen• operations are one of the most complicated of sive way to victory or prestige. military undertakings, requiring detailed This is an attractive looking book with its planning, specialized equipment, a high degree handsome blue binding, original hand drawn of training, and flawless coordination among maps and a ribbon for keeping your place. naval, ground and air forces — and they were However, it is unlikely to be a big seller if only central to the Western Allies' prosecution of the because of the price. This is unfortunate because war. To generations bred on Saturday matinees Sea Devils is highly recommended both as an of John Wayne and friends "hitting the beach" account of a band of incredibly brave men and from innumerable ramp-bowed landing craft, it as a casebook on the development and use of seems incredible that until 1934 neither the US special forces. Army, Navy nor even Marine Corps had a doctrine to ensure the successful landing and R.J. Summers sustaining of troops on a well-defended shore far Orléans, Ontario from support bases. But only in that year did there appear The Tentative Manual for Landing Book Reviews 115

Operations. And none of the specialized amphi• should be accompanied by a similar map of the bious craft yet existed, even in conceptual form. European theatre. Ironically, it was a US Marine observer witnes• None of these points seriously detract, sing a 1937 Japanese assault in China who got however, from what should become a standard the idea for mission-built ramp-bow-type boats reference of the greatest exercise ever of global capable of transporting troops and vehicles and maritime power. depositing them onto beaches. The subsequent "Special Boat Plan" of 1938 would put some Richard H. Gimblett extremely useful hardware into the hands of the Blackburn Hamlet, Ontario Navy and Marines within three years. Even then, with all the demands for other war matériel, it Gerald E. Wheeler. Kinkaid of the Seventh would be some time before the new vessels Fleet: A Biography of Admiral Thomas C. could be produced in any useful quantities. Kinkaid, U.S. Navy. Washington, DC: Naval As a result, the ways and means of waging Historical Center, 1995 and Annapolis: Naval modern amphibious operations was still an un• Institute Press, 1996. xvii + 531 pp., photo• tried art when the United States entered the war. graphs, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. The British-Canadian disaster at Dieppe did not US $37.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-936-0. dispel the prediction of strategist Liddell Hart that modern air power made amphibious opera• Gerald E. Wheeler's Kinkaid of the Seventh tions almost impossible. The first Marine assault Fleet is, as the title suggests, a biography of of the war, at Guadalcanal, also in August 1942, Admiral Thomas Cassin Kinkaid, commander of met greater success on the beach, but then hung what was often termed "MacArthur's navy" in the balance for six months as determined during World War II. Kinkaid has long deserved Japanese sea and air attacks hampered sustain- a biography. Other Pacific War fleet and major ment operations. Thereafter, however, followed task force commanders have been the subjects of an unbroken series of triumphs: Torch (North numerous studies. While Kinkaid's Seventh Africa), Husky (Sicily), Cartwheel (MacArthur's Fleet was not as "glamorous" as the Third/Fifth alternating series of operations through the Fleet with its powerful big-carrier task forces, Solomon Islands and up the New Guinea coast), "MacArthur's navy" played a crucial role in the Catchpole (the Marshall Islands), Overlord, war against Japan and Kinkaid was a participant Forager, Detachment (Iwo Jima), and ultimately in one of the most significant, and controversial Iceberg (Okinawa). None were a foregone con• of its battles — Leyte Gulf. clusion, but only Galvanic, at Tarawa in Novem• Tom Kinkaid was a solid, or perhaps stolid, ber 1943, faced the distinct possibility of defeat. naval officer. In a show less of humility than of Lorelli's narrative embraces all of these, but honesty, he told an oral historian: "I'm a great other than the tentative beginnings, he covers believer in the average man — not having brains little new ground. Each operation has been the myself. I'm a great believer in the average man subject of (at least) several studies of its own. who will get down and work and who has By bringing them all together under one cover, judgment, good judgment, other than a very however, he confirms the otherwise all-too- keen, very high I.Q." (489) hastily stated assumption of the fundamental Kinkaid was apparently near-colourless, as importance of the sea and maritime operations to well as average. Wheeler's study of the man the Western way of life. This volume is useful, includes few of the humorous, touching, or too, for demonstrating the variety of special illustrative anecdotes that often flesh out a craft and their many uses. One quibble would be biography. Those the author did include do little that more line drawings and a glossary are to make Kinkaid anything more than a two- needed for a work attempting to be definitive. dimensional character. When news of the Japan• Nor are the maps (all borrowed from previous ese surrender reached the admiral, for example, works) always useful. The best, depicting the he hosted a dinner in Manila for the navy's flag US amphibious advance across the Pacific, is officers and their aides. One staff member wrote too small to identify all the locales covered, and in his diary: "I thought it would be a Victory 116 The Northern Mariner

Dinner or at least a jolly affair but it was rather was the centre-piece of his professional career, stiff and soon over. A two course dinner" (431). it is not the high point of this book. After Tom Kinkaid was little moved by the spending two hundred pages covering Kinkaid's course of events that unfolded during a career important, but relatively less significant service that began in 1904 and ended in 1950. After the during the first two years of the war, Wheeler Great War, then-Lieutenant Kinkaid served on devotes but a hundred of the book's five hun• the staff of Admiral Mark Bristol in Constanti• dred pages to the admiral's two years as Com• nople, where the US Navy found itself in the mander, Seventh Fleet. The author's narrative, middle of the bloody Greek-Turkish and Russian while balanced and based principally on primary civil wars. These vast human tragedies pass vir• sources, is nonetheless spare. The non-naval- tually unnoticed in Wheeler's narrative, and focused secondary works that might have given unremarked by Kinkaid, except for an admission greater depth to the account are absent. For a half-century later that his time in Constanti• example, neither the war-time volume of D. nople had been "interesting." As naval attaché in Clayton James's masterful biography of Douglas Rome on the eve of World War II, we again see MacArthur nor Ed Drea's excellent study of the Kinkaid at work, but he is no "Pug" Henry! As use of intelligence in the Southwest Pacific the world headed toward global cataclysm, Kin• command appear in the bibliography or notes. kaid has his evening cocktail and plays golf Both these works are highly complementary of (shooting in the "upper 80s"). Wheeler, in an Kinkaid's personal and professional skills. incredible statement, concludes that while Kin• James' Kinkaid was a man trusted and respected kaid was well aware of what was going on by MacArthur, while Drea's work highlights around him, "it just didn't seem too important"! several instances where Kinkaid proved himself When the war began, Kinkaid, a rear admiral, flexible enough to alter plans at the last minute found himself in command of cruisers and des• to take complete advantage of the intelligence troyers screening carrier task forces in the gained by the code-breakers. Oddly, given the Pacific. His record was mixed. In three major central role of intelligence in the Pacific war, operations he lost two carriers: one torpedoed the term is not even indexed in Wheeler's book! and badly damaged by a Japanese submarine, Thomas Kinkaid clearly failed to catch the another sunk by air attack. Nevertheless, a imagination of his biographer. This study took shortage of flag officers led Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to give Kinkaid, a surface warrior, more than twenty years to complete and publish, command of a carrier task force. Kinkaid em• in part because of the author's declining health, barrassingly almost missed his rendezvous but also, I suspect, because Wheeler never before the Guadalcanal campaign because he developed an affinity for his subject. The book forgot about the international date line! Then, in is as dry, colourless, and humourless as Admiral the battles of the Eastern Solomons and Santa Kinkaid. It reads not like a labour of love, but a Cruz Island, Kinkaid's carrier was twice dam• mere labour. In short, this is a below-average aged and knocked out of operations. biography of an "average" man.

Not surprisingly, Nimitz decided in late Michael A. Palmer 1942 that Kinkaid was "tired" and in need of a Greenville, North Carolina trip back to the States "for a rest." But before he left Hawaii, a command crisis in the North Norman Friedman. U.S. Submarines Through Pacific induced Nimitz to send Kinkaid instead J 945: An Illustrated Design History. Annapolis: to Alaska. For ten months he performed reputab• Naval Institute Press, 1995. xii + 379 pp., ly, working well with his army and air force (as photographs, figures, tables, appendices, notes, well as Canadian) counterparts. It was this index. Cdn $83.95, US $59.95, cloth; ISBN 1- ability to get along, not the amphibious assault 55750-263-3. Canadian distributor, Vanwell against Kiska two weeks after it had been evac• Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. uated by the Japanese, which led Nimitz to pick Kinkaid to take charge of the Seventh Fleet. Norman Friedman is well known for the number While Kinkaid's stint as fleet commander and quality of his books on the development of Book Reviews 117 ships and weapon systems. His many reference quently attempting extensive analytical com• works on subjects ranging from battleships and ments in the endnotes. When the notes provide destroyers to a regularly revised weapons ency• additional detail to his technical discussion, they clopedia pay painstaking attention to technical work. When he tries to do historical analysis, detail and provide essential service to both they do not. Friedman completely misses the ex• historians and interested amateurs. In this book tent of the interwar debate in submarine strat• he presents a narrative of submarine design and egy, its impact on the development of design, technical development from the invention of the and the role of Commander Thomas Withers, craft through the "Silent Victory" of 1945. the Naval War College faculty, and the Submar• The present volume and its companion, the ine Officers Conference in the late 1920s. He latter following American submarine develop• also underestimates the effect of German U-boat ment from 1945 to the present, supersede the technology on both general design issues and the author's earlier work, Submarine Design and development of diesel propulsion in the United Development. Readers familiar with that work States. Admirals Yarnell and Robinson at the will recall its awkward organization and un• Bureau of Engineering did not. Neither does the friendly format. While richly illustrated with nature of the absolutely critical relationship photos and line drawings, at best it proved a between Electric Boat Company and the Navy, cumbersome research tool. It appealed to those especially concerning the NELSECO diesels for interested in submarine history because of its the S-Class and later mobilization for World unequalled technical detail. Thankfully, War II, appear in an effective analytical context. Friedman has solved all these problems in this If Friedman intends to attempt effective his• volume. The organization of U.S. Submarine torical analysis, he should remove this kind of Through 1945 is clear and easy to follow, as is material from the endnotes, place it into the nar• the prose presenting that unequalled Friedman rative, and cast his primary research net more technical information. While a few of the line widely to acquire more context as well as politi• drawings seem clumsy, those by James Christley cal, social, and economic detail. He should also stand out for their excellence, their welcome use more of the important secondary literature clarity, and the important support they give to either ignored or poorly exploited in his current the text. The abundance of rare and revealing notes. black and white photographs also enhance the History must satisfy a reader's search for work nicely. Furthermore, these photos appear explanation. It must explore the significance of with a freshness and clarity that enable readers human relationships and events in an effort to to derive maximum benefit from their detail. acquire insight into individuals, institutions, and While the title of this book employs the society. All scholars of submarines and undersea word "history," this superb reference work is warfare must consult Dr. Friedman's excellent actually a chronicle. The author's goals never technical reference work. As such, it has no led him to attempt a systematic historical analy• peer. As history, it has a long way to go. sis of submarine design and technical develop• ment within the broader context of the relation• Gary E. Weir ship between the Navy, industry, and the scien• Washington, DC tific community that made the submarine force of World War II possible. Unfortunately, some Carl LaVO. Back from the Deep: The Strange of the apparatus usually found in histories might Story of the Sister Subs Squalus and Sculpin. have proved useful. Though there are copious Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994. ix + 226 explanatory reference notes, Friedman's unsys• pp., photographs, bibliographic essay, index. US tematic citation style too often fails to provide $27.95, Cdn $38.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-507- sufficient information to follow his footsteps 1. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. through the archives and secondary sources. Catharines, ON. Friedman's source notes pose yet another dilemma for informed readers. He tries to Back from the Deep is an intriguing tale about a deepen the historical nature of his work by fre• group of US Navy submariners who survived a 118 The Northern Mariner peacetime disaster and a sinking by enemy ac• Squalus disaster and on to the war in the Pacific. tion. Carl LaVO has written a submarine history The enormous demands placed upon the sub• with a difference. Accounts of wartime actions mariners and the challenges faced in a service of fleet submarines of the US Navy against the that was still highly developmental were met Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific abound. with optimism and youthful exuberance. The However, personal experiences of men of the early days of the war exposed shortcomings in "Silent Service" are largely unknown. LaVO, a commanding officers, weapons and equipment. journalist, has used the histories of the submar• After Pearl Harbor, only the submarine force ines USS Squalus and Sculpin as vehicles for was capable of offensive action against Japan telling the stories of their crews and the risks and the boats averaged about 300 days on patrol they faced and trials endured. These stories are during the first two years of the war. Crew based on interviews with and personal accounts exhaustion was prevalent. Nevertheless, the of survivors from those ill-fated "boats," submariners held on and as the force grew it painstakingly collected by the author. became increasingly efficient and audacious, Squalus and Sculpin were Sargo-c\zss sub• carrying the war into Japanese home waters. The marines, sister ships built at the Portsmouth work of the submarines was decisive and Naval Shipyard and launched in 1938. Squalus brought Japan to the verge of economic collapse sunk in 240 feet of water during post-building through blockade. The cost was great and cap• trails and thirty-three survivors were rescued by tured submariners were treated with extraordi• means of the US Navy's experimental submar• nary severity by the Japanese. ine rescue bell. She was later raised, recommis- LaVO's effort represents a considerable sioned as USS Sailfish, and served with con• achievement in the realm of oral history and a siderable distinction through twelve arduous war success in bringing the story of the men of the patrols in the Pacific campaign. Her tally "Silent Service" into the public domain. The included the small Japanese carrier Chuyo. book is highly readable although it is overly Sculpin located the sunken Squalus and stood by dramatic in places. Fleet boat sailors might be her during the rescue. She too fought in the critical of his handling of some of the technical Pacific and was sunk on her ninth war patrol. details of submarine equipment and procedures Forty-two survived that action and were taken but this is minor. Of particular value to those prisoner. Twenty of these were being transported interested in the subject is LaVO's excellent to Japan in the carrier Chuyo when she was bibliographic essay on his sources. intercepted and sunk by Sailfish. One Sculpin sailor was rescued and later reunited with the W.G.D. Lund others at Ofuna prison camp, named the "Tor• Victoria, British Columbia ture Farm" by the submariners. Most were eventually sent to a forced labour camp at Carl Boyd and Akihiko Yoshida. The Japanese Ashio, north of Tokyo. Sailfish finished her war Submarine Force and World War II. Annapolis: as a training boat for the submarine school at Naval Institute Press, 1995. xiv + 272 pp., maps, New London. photographs, tables.appendices, notes,bibliogra• LaVO's intention is to tell the story of the phy, index. US $32.95, Cdn $45.95, cloth; ISBN men who sailed in Squalus/Sailfish and Sculpin. 1-55750-080-0. Canadian distributor, Vanwell His method is to allow the human drama to Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. unfold through melding information gleaned from personal interviews with familiar primary The role of submarines in the Pacific during and secondary source material on the pre-war World War II proved vitally important for submarine force and wartime operations. His Allied forces and enormously disappointing for detailed knowledge of the characters and their the Japanese. This book attempts to assess the experiences is impressive. The reader follows reasons for this latter failure, paying particular the submariners from their time as recruits from attention to Japanese sources and the impact of depression-wracked American society, through signals intelligence on the course of the war. their arduous submarine school training and the The authors briefly review the major influences Book Reviews 119 affecting the development of the Japanese sub• effectiveness ofAllied anti-submarine techniques marine force at the turn of the century and trace and the rigidity of Japanese tactics. the history of that service through to the end of The weakest part of the book is, perhaps, the Pacific war. A major factor in their story are the lack of understanding the authors appear to the technical details, which occupy a distract- have of Allied anti-submarine warfare. While it ingly large proportion of the main text. is frequently repeated that Allied anti-submarine The majority of the book is devoted to an techniques were deadly, the reasons for this are overview of actual submarine operations during never dealt with. An analysis of Allied anti• the war. This brief history attempts to cover all submarine efforts may not have been the focus facets but is so concise that it cannot be con• of the book, but Allied success and Japanese sidered comprehensive. The obvious strengths of failings cannot be understood without this the authors are their knowledge of Japanese comparison. The sources and bibliography are operational concepts and strategy and of Allied also weak in this area, suggesting less research intelligence techniques. These aspects of the in this critical aspect than in other areas. campaign are well covered and provide useful There are few errors in the book, but insights into the reasons for Japanese failures. In Canadian readers will be surprised to learn that particular, the Japanese obsession with 1-25 sank a freighter on 20 June, 1942. Though manoeuvring submarines as part of the battle unnamed, the freighter in question was the Fort fleet to engage Allied warships repeatedly Ca/waswM, which returned to port with a cargo of resulted in Japanese submarines being thrown lumber although struck by one torpedo and against the most difficult targets, high speed shelled ineffectually by the Japanese submarine. warships escorted by numerous anti-submarine The description of the sea battles off Guadal• escorts. Usually the result proved deadly to the canal in mid-November 1942 is also curious, submarines, but there were occasional outstand• although technically correct. The book lists only ing successes. One of the most remarkable the major warships sunk, two Japanese battle• torpedo salvoes of the entire war came from I- ships and two US light cruisers. These bloody 19 on 13 September, 1942. Three of the six battles also resulted in the sinking of seven torpedoes launched struck the US carrier USS American and three Japanese destroyers, as well Wasp at a range of 1,000 yards, while the as severe damage to a host of ships, especially remaining three carried on another twelve miles a number of American cruisers in the first before encountering a second US carrier group encounter. Brief surveys of complex events where one torpedo hit and damaged the battle• cannot highlight all aspects, but the losses in ship USS North Carolina and a second hit (and these two battles were far heavier, and more eventually sank) the destroyer USS O'Brien. evenly matched, than the description in this This incident also graphically demonstrates the book suggests. outstanding quality of Japanese torpedoes, which This book is an interesting addition to the were orders of magnitude better than either literature on the Pacific war. It provides useful Allied or German equivalents. insights into the Japanese perspective on the The superiority of American signals intelli• submarine campaign in the war, and demon• gence also contributed to the difficulties of strates again the important contribution of Japanese submariners by often allowing US anti• signals intelligence to Allied success. However, submarine forces to be well positioned to deal significant areas of the campaign are discussed with Japanese efforts. The USS England sank only in passing. It is competently written, and six submarines in less than two weeks with the well illustrated. The final result is a book that is aid of decrypted messages in the most remark• useful to those interested in this specific cam• able display of anti-submarine effectiveness in a paign, but which is less comprehensive than single patrol by one ship in any theatre during might have been hoped. the war. The fact that US ships were able to systematically work their way along a submarine D.M. McLean patrol line — as England did — destroying sub• Orleans, Ontario marines as they went along, says much for the 120 The Northern Mariner

Hugh Power. Carrier Lexington. College Sta• CVT-16, because of that city's valuable role in tion: Texas A&M University Press, 1996. xx + air-operations training. 154 pp., photographs, figures, glossary, appen• Citizens raised $3 million locally from a dices, suggested reading, index. US $34.95, bond sale to finance the transformation of this cloth; $14.95 (plus $4 s+h to USA, $5 to fighting ship to a permanent naval museum. The Canada), paper; ISBN 0-89096-681-8. author's account of the physical preparations to accommodate the vessel at dockside makes This book could well be sub-titled Anatomy Of almost as fascinating reading as its previous An Aircraft Carrier, for it describes one such career at sea. Engineering requirements included vessel in almost loving detail. Author-photo• the construction of an 870-foot approach cause• grapher Hugh Power takes his readers aboard way, dredging a channel twelve feet deep and the carrier USS Lexington, for years one of the 1,400 feet long from the existing ship channel, most formidable of the US Navy warships, settling the hull into a prepared ditch, and which now lies permanently berthed at Corpus ballasting it by pumping in over five million Christi, Texas. On 8 November 1991, the ship gallons of fresh water, specially treated to became the last of the World War II-era aircraft prevent deterioration and heavy enough to keep carriers to retire from active duty. Since then, the ship in place even during a hurricane. Exten• civilian volunteers have converted her decks and sive re-engineering was made, from painting cabins into a museum that interprets her illustri• every inch inside to designing tour routes ous war service and peacetime duties and ex• through the carrier, resulting in an impressive plains the history of US naval aviation. educational exhibit that draws an average of half Power ably tells how Lexington (CV-16) a million visitors each year. entered World War II as the second of the The author is also an accomplished photo• Essex-class, carriers to be commissioned. One of grapher, and he has catalogued virtually every the most decorated of all US Navy carriers, aspect of the vessel with fifty-two contemporary Lexington destroyed more than 1,000 Japanese black and white photos. These plates greatly aircraft, sank approximately 1,000,000 tons of enhance the text and are very effective in con• enemy shipping in the Pacific, sent its planes to veying the specifics of ship layout, equipment, bomb Japan, and generally helped establish the operational areas, and crew accommodation. A aircraft carrier as the most powerful class of mix of aerial views and interiors, they add much warship, displacing the big-gun battleships that to the book's interest, offering a unique visual had dominated naval warfare during the first tour, almost a visitor's stroll through the decks, half of the twentieth century. engine room, hangars, galley, bunks, and top• The ship went on to serve for almost fifty side. As well, there are seventeen photos show• years, undergoing repeated modifications with ing Lexington from its commissioning day, such developments as an angled flight-deck, through wartime and subsequent service. Suitab• streamlined superstructure "island," radar sys• ly enough, there are also fourteen plates illus• tems, special treatment steel (STS) armour, and trating the variety of aircraft types which oper• steam catapult. These updates caused the ship's ated from its flight-deck over the years. Buffs of original displacement of 27,000 tons in 1942 to ship architecture can gain even more from the increase gradually until it reached 33,000 tons at six inboard and outboard profile floor plans. the time of her de-commissioning in 1991. These show every cabin and cubbyhole on each She had a good inning at sea, but her long- deck from bow to stern, and are effective in delayed retirement became necessary when conveying the huge capacity of its cavernous ageing machinery and systems began to cost 40,000 square-foot hangar. more than shrinking naval budgets could justify. However, with all the details told about this On March 8, 1991, Lt. Kathleen Owen, USN, individual ship, the author puts it well when he made the last of a record 493,248 arrested says, "It's a book about a sea change in the way landings on Lexington during the ship's forty- we fight on the oceans, the biggest change since eight-year service career. Corpus Christi won the sails replaced oars. And Lexington has become bid to receive the vessel, by then re-designated a laboratory and classroom in which that change Book Reviews 121

can be studied and understood. No ship can Stillwell's emphasis on the personnel offer more in retirement." connected to the ship begins with his description of an ensign examining the welds during the Sidney Allinson summer of 1941 and Margaret Truman's chris• Victoria, British Columbia tening of the ship at its launching on 29 January 1944. Missouri's first combat duty was to Paul Stillwell. Battleship Missouri: An Illus• provide anti-aircraft defence for carriers attack• trated History. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, ing Honshu and I wo Jima in February and 1996. xiv + 450 pp., photographs, illustrations, March 1945. A month later, in her first shore appendices, notes, bibliography, index. US $55, bombardment, Missouri's sixteen-inch guns Cdn $77, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-780-5. Canadian pounded Okinawa after which she stood off the distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, island to provide anti-aircraft defence for four ON. carriers whose planes flew close air support for the invading Marines. Stillwell describes the Paul Stillwell, director of the history division of September 1945 Japanese surrender ceremony in the US Naval Institute, has established a distin• detail, including a diagram of the setting and guished record of publications based on oral reproductions of the surrender instruments. histories. To his previous works, Air Raid: Pearl Missouri's triumphant return to New York City Harbor, The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of and the celebrations there receive treatment that the First Black Naval Officers, and Assault on is almost as exhaustive . Normandy, he now adds this history of the "Big The chapter on Missourfs 1946 return of Mo" (BB-63), the last battleship to serve on the remains of Turkish ambassador Mehmet active duty in any navy. It joins his previous Munir Ertegun to Istanbul reflects recent schol• works on Arizona (BB-39) and New Jersey (BB- arship as does the account of the vessel's 1950 62). In each, Stillwell joins anecdote-laden grounding off Old Point Comfort, Virginia, narratives to superb collections of photographs which contains several photographs not previ• to produce classic accounts of three of the ously published. Stillwell's focus on the men world's great fighting machines. who served in the ship and their stories give life Though best known for hosting the surren• to the narrative, especially to the chapters on the der of Japan at the end of World War II, the Korean War and Missourfs three decades in Missouri participated in several other significant mothballs. events during the half century from the laying of A few paragraphs on the various roles and her keel in 1941 to her second decommissioning weapons configurations proposed for the Iowa- in 1992. Stillwell devotes nearly two-thirds of class battleships during the 1980s would have the book to Missourfs decade of active duty enhanced the thorough discussion of technologi• during the final phases of World War II, the cal aspects of the recommissioning of Missouri. early years of the Cold War, and operations off The chapter on Missourfs participation in the Korea. He briefly describes her three decades in Gulf War is balanced, not over-playing her role mothballs, 1955-1984 before closing his narra• or that of the navy in the conflict. The final tive with a hundred pages on the decade begin• chapter, on Missouri's second decommission• ning with her second commissioning in 1984. ing, though sad, is not maudlin. Appendices include a chronology of Missouri's Stillwell based the book on oral interviews active service, 1944-55 and 1984-92, lists of her (many conducted by the author between 1991 commanding officers and signers of the Japanese and 1994), newspaper and magazine articles, surrender documents, and data on her displace• cruise books, and official records. The result is ment, dimensions, machinery, armour, arma• a fine tribute to one of the great ships of the ment, and electronic systems plus lines drawings modem era. of the ship and cut-away showing her compart• ments as outfitted in 1991. The result is as James C. Bradford comprehensive a history, both visual and narra• Bryan, Texas tive, as is likely ever to be published. 122 The Northern Mariner

John A. Butler. Strike Able-Peter: The Stranding salvage tugs to pull her free two full weeks after and Salvage of the USS Missouri. Annapolis: the grounding. Naval Institute Press, 1995. xv + 220 pp., pho• Butler does an excellent job tracking the tographs, illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, inevitable inquests. The Navy, true to its tradi• bibliography, index. US $31.95, Cdn $44.95, tions, was very critical of itself and used this cloth; ISBN 1-55750-094-0. Canadian distribu• event to identify and correct major personnel tor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. issues across the fleet. The effect of the ground• ing on each career involved is carefully tracked Forty-five years after the fact an incredible story and is well worth the attention. of the most embarrassing event in the modern All told, Strike Able-Peter is an excellent history of the US Navy has finally been written. read, well worth the time and reasonable price. The stranding of the USS Missouri in Chesa• The author has done a very credible job expos• peake Bay in 1950 was a huge blow to the pres• ing the real story, something that cannot always tige of the world's most powerful navy. The be done soon after the events. Time heals and same ship used five years before as the surren• makes us more wise and John Butler has done der platform to bring World War II to a close his part. was driven hard aground in broad daylight on the very well travelled route in and out of the Roland H. Webb Navy's largest base. White Rock, British Columbia John Butler does an excellent job dissecting the nature of the people and the fleet itself lead• I.J. Galantin. Submarine Admiral: From Battle- ing up to the event. Five years of peace with no wagons to Ballistic Missiles. Champaign, IL: focus and no enemy had let the Navy decay University of Illinois Press, 1995. ix + 345 pp., from the powerful force that delivered victory in photographs, appendix, notes, index. US $24.95, the Pacific. Dead-ended careers and reduced cloth; ISBN 0-252-02160-6. budgets demotivated the complete operational structure of the ship and indeed the fleet. This In this fascinating memoir, retired Admiral I.J. most prestigious vessel was relegated to nothing "Pete" Galantin recounts his lengthy service as more than a training platform; naval aviation a submariner in the United States Navy. During ruled the fleet of the future. his forty-one year career, Galantin had the A reader who is not a navigator will find experience of serving in or being connected with the description of events leading up to the the development of a wide variety of submar• grounding difficult to follow. However, no one ines, from the obsolescent R- and S-boats, built who has ever been in a command and/or com• in the first years after World War I, to the SSN munication role will miss the glaring breakdown 688 fast-attack subs of the Los Angeles class, of both in the last critical minutes. begun in the late 1960s. Because he already had While the events leading up to the ground• written about his formative experiences as ing were tragic and unnecessary the efforts to wartime skipper of the USS Halibut in his book get the ship off the gently sloping beach were Take Her Deep! (Algonquin Books of Chapel heroic, innovative and a tribute to the triumph of Hill, 1987), the author found no need in this engineering and salvage technology. Driven memoir to centre his recollections around any aground with enough force to reduce the ship's single period of his professional life. Submarine draft by six feet, the ship continued up the beach /W/w;>a/therefore progresses through Galantin's for a full minute and a half after all seawater naval career in chronological fashion in a suc• suction and therefore power was lost. Lacking cession of short chapters, each devoted to a any future tide that would allow her to be certain topic or service assignment. refloated, Missouri had to be stripped of fuel, The particular value of any autobiography stores and ammunition in order to reduce her that is written by a high-level military or naval displacement by almost 12,000 tons. A basin officer lies in providing the reader with a per• was then dredged around her as well as a chan• spective on national events that is unlikely to be nel to open water, allowing a massive fleet of furnished elsewhere. To be most useful, though, Book Reviews 123 such a book should be relatively candid with Rickover was able to accomplish so much for regard to the author's feelings about the people the Navy despite his intemperate, abusive de• he has known and explicit about his outlook on meanour toward subordinates and his disdainful events. Submarine Admiral meets these criteria attitude toward his ostensible seniors in the well. Pete Galantin emerges from the pages of chain of command. this well-written account as an optimistic, With its thoughtful perspective on events, resourceful naval officer who appreciated the Submarine Admiral should appeal both to histor• efforts of his fellow officers even as he acknow• ians and to interested readers of naval and ledged their human foibles, as well as his own. maritime history. Because he served in a series of increasing• ly senior positions related to submarine matters Jeffrey G. Barlow from mid-century until his retirement in 1970, Manassas, Virginia Galantin provides us with an interesting look at some of the high-level by-play behind the Bernard Prézelin (éd.); English-language edition development of the US Navy's submarine capa• prepared by A.D. Baker III. 77ze Naval Institute bilities during this formative period. Two of the Guide to Combat Fleets of the World. Their major figures of those years to emerge from the Ships, Aircraft, and Armament. Annapolis: Naval pages of this book are Admiral Arleigh Burke, Institute Press, 1995. CD-ROM text, images the now legendary Chief of Naval Operations (recommended system requirements: 386SX- (CNO) who served as the US Navy's senior processor or higher IBM PC, PS/2 or compatible uniformed leader for six years, and Admiral computer, 256 colour VGA graphic capability Hyman Rickover, the driven head of the Navy's [640-480 minimum], Windows 3.1 or later, 4 nuclear propulsion program. MB free space on hard disk). US $495, ISBN 1- The Arleigh Burke shown to us by Pete 55750-110-6. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Galantin is faithful to the man remembered by Publishing, St. Catharines, ON. those of us who had the privilege of knowing him — highly energetic, engaging, open to new Richard Sharpe (éd.). Jane's Fighting Ships ideas, and yet easily angered by second-rate 1996-97. Coulsdon, Surrey: Jane's Information thinking or undue partisanship for a particular Group Ltd. 96 + 902 pp., tables, photographs, Navy (surface, aviation, submarine) community. glossary, indexes. US $275, cloth; ISBN 0-7106- Galantin recounts a number of incidents in 1355-5. Also available on CD-ROM. which, because he served as the senior submar• ine branch representative in OpNav, he suffered Both Jane's Fighting Ships and Combat Fleets Burke's wrath over unwelcome publicity which of the World are now available as CD-ROMs as the CNO had traced to the efforts of submarine well as in book form. Both books are expensive; proponents. And yet, as Galantin notes, he was the electronic versions even more so, but the not concerned that Burke's momentary angry convenience of electronic access in multiple user outbursts would damage his career, since the situations such as military colleges and head• CNO was too great a leader for this. quarters is undeniable. For the individual user Galantin's viewpoint on Hyman Rickover is who inserts the CD into the drive on his own similarly enlightening. Rickover is one of those computer, there is not much difference. The polarizing individuals in recent history who is method of navigating through the contents is either hated or revered by entire generations of quickly learned, even by a novice. In the case of naval officers. Galantin worked closely with Combat Fleets one can access information by Admiral Rickover for many years on the devel• country, by ship type, by name or by hull opment of nuclear submarines. Yet because he number. Naval aircraft, weapons systems and was not a member of Rickover's team, he was sensors are also accessible. If one demands able to view the irascible admiral's personality information on Canadian Halifax-class frigates, and working methods more dispassionately than for instance, we arrive at a page giving full many of his contemporaries. Accordingly, he specifications and a list of all ships of the class provides useful insights in his book about how with hull numbers. A very clear elevation can be 124 The Northern Mariner

accessed which indicates and identifies weapons more menacing times, and India is anxious to and sensors: clicking on any one provides the join the club. specifications for that system. There is also a list Interesting vessels under construction or of ships for which photographs are available — proposed include, possibly, a group of "arsenal more than would be possible in the printed book ships" (by the US Navy). These large vessels version. These photos are black and white and with a crew of only 50 would be packed with taken from different aspects. You cannot page hundreds of missiles of every type — navy, army ahead to the next class or back to a previous and air force — which it would launch on com• one, but three clicks of the mouse will get you mand and which would then be taken over and anywhere you want to go. These comments refer controlled by other ships, aircraft or units on only to Combat Fleets, as the reviewer did not shore. The idea is to replace pre-positioned have access to the CD-ROM version of Jane's. equipment in theatres where allied co-operation However, it is assumed that the Jane's CD- might be less than enthusiastic. Sharpe points ROMs are fairly similar from the user's point of out that such a ship would be every submarin• view. er's dream target! In the UK the Helicopter Like Jane's, Combat Fleets has a foreword Carrier (LPH) Oceanhas been launched and two describing the world naval situation and com• much delayed amphibious force vessels (LPDs) ments on the characteristics and progress of each seem to be on order at last. Diesel propulsion navy. Combat Fleets is only published every and very modest speeds of 18 and 17 knots have second year, making this the current edition, been accepted for these ships. The Russian Navy though it was published in 1995. In contrast, a is concentrating on reviving the submarine service, but the carrier Kuznetsov and a Task new edition of Jane's is published every year, Group deployed to the Mediterranean last year making it the more current publication. Both and observers were exchanged with a US Navy benefit by a combination of modern communica• carrier. This would have been an unthinkable tion techniques and a comparatively relaxed and event ten years ago. co-operative atmosphere among naval powers, resulting in more accurate and detailed informa• To return to the editor's comments in the tion than ever before, although I did find some introduction: his region-by-region survey con• errors in Combat Fleets — the Canadian MSA cludes with Canada, about which he is absolute• 112 is given as "Baffin" instead of "Moresby," ly scathing. Sharpe maintains that the prevarica• for instance. As CD-ROMs are soon likely to be tion over replacing our helicopters and submar• superseded by continuously updated on-line ines and spending vast sums in compensation for services, accuracy and completeness in the cancelled contracts and in maintaining obsolete future will be limited only by national security submarines and unsafe helicopters is the most policies. flagrant case of mis-management in the naval Richard Sharpe's survey of the naval world, worse even than the British delays over situation in Jane's has resulted in more com• amphibious vessels. It is a situation caused by a ment and controversy than usual, as he stoutly class of politician with no understanding of defends both deterrent nuclear weapons and military affairs and the result is that our dedi• nuclear propulsion. The five naval powers that cated personnel are not given the tools they need deploy submarine-launched ballistic missiles — to do their job. the USA, Russia, Britain, France and China — One final remark should, perhaps, be made are evidently determined to maintain them and on the question of CD-ROM technology vs. the to continue technical development, to judge by printed page: a century from now the book will the French nuclear tests conducted in the face of still be as readable as it is today, but will any widespread public protest and condemnation. instruments survive that can read 1990s CDs? China, with just one aging SSBN, is embarking Books may be bulky, but they still have their on the development of a new missile and launch merits! platform. These five navies also operate nuclear- powered attack submarines. New versions are Douglas Maginley being built, though at a slower rate than during Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia