BOOK REVIEWS

Robert J. Allison. Stephen Decatur. American and superiors, not to mention the American press Naval Hero, 1779-1820. Amherst, and public, latched on to his successes and Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts lauded him with accolades such as "the terror of Press, www.umass.edu/empress. 2005, viii + 253 the foe." This acclaim earned him promotion to pp., illustrations, notes, index, US $34.95, cloth; the rank of captain at a younger age than any ISBN 1-55849-492-8. other officer in the service. When the War of 1812 began, there Stephen Decatur is probably the best known hero was tension among the senior officers as to who of the early days of the United States Navy. At would get the most prestigious command afloat. least ten American towns and cities are named Decatur, who had officially been a after him, as are a dozen or more counties, "commodore" since 1809, was able to get off on innumerable roads, libraries and schools. The list his own in the US frigate United States and won of books about the man is almost as long, with the second of three significant American such titles as Hellfire in Tripoli and Stephen victories over British frigates when he fought Decatur Gallant Boy: Childhoods of Famous and captured HMS Macedonian on 25 October Americans. The current title is one of three 1812; again he set himself apart by being the major works about Decatur published in the past only commander to bring a prized British frigate two years. into port. He spent the rest of the war under Decatur had very limited experience at blockade until being captured in the President sea when he joined the US Navy in 1798, which while trying to break out from New York in the author illustrates by repeating the oft-told January 1815. An inquiry absolved Decatur of story that the 19-year old midshipman penciled blame for the capture, but, as the author details, in the names of the rigging lines at their various his anxiety over the loss left him desperate to belaying points so as to be able to respond to redeem himself. He found a way to do this when orders faster. By 1812, however, Decatur was ordered to serve as second in command to ranked among the four most influential officers Bainbridge in an expedition meant to quell the in the navy. His contemporaries, John Rodgers, latest hostilities in the Mediterranean. Through William Bainbridge and Isaac Chauncey, were some conniving correspondence with the navy older than he was and had all been well- secretary, Decatur received permission to sail weathered sea dogs before beginning their with most of the squadron before Bainbridge careers, but Decatur's star had risen faster and could. The "terror of the foe" then seized the more radiantly. While serving in the opportunity to aggressively, and effectively, Mediterranean during the Tripolitan War, as the settle the issues before his superior could reach others had, he took the few opportunities that Gibraltar, earning Bainbridge's scarcely arose to distinguish himself, particularly in the disguised enmity. destruction in February 1804 of the captured US American naval officers of the period frigate Philadelphia, which Bainbridge had lost were constantly at odds with one another, at Tripoli. Vice Admiral Lord Nelson is waging bitter feuds and fighting duels. As supposed to have commented that Decatur's already shown, Decatur was no stranger to such deed was "the most bold and daring act of the controversies, the most acrid being his conflict age" but the author points out the lack of with Commodore James Barron, which dated contemporary evidence to prove this frequently- back to 1807, and in which numerous officers repeated line was ever uttered. Besides, such were implicated. Publicly, Decatur deplored the escapades as the Philadelphia raid and Decatur's practice of duelling as a means for resolving several gunboat actions would have earned a differences, but he failed to settle his long feud Royal Navy lieutenant only a paragraph or two with Barron peacefully and suffered a in Naval Chronicle, whereas Decatur's friends meaningless death, at age 41, after meeting

53 54 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

Barron on the dueling grounds at Bladensburg. Malcolm Archibald. Across the Pond. Chapters Thereafter, he entered the pantheon of immortal from the Atlantic. Caithness, Scotland; Whittles American heroes, a status he still very much Publishing, www.whittlespublishing.com. 2001. enjoys. viii + 192 pp., photographs, glossary, There is much to commend in this bibliography, UK £15.95, paper; ISBN 1- treatment of Decatur's life. Robert Allison 870325-33-8. writes in a clear and engaging style, laying down the story in a straightforward chronology, Across the Pond is a rich blend of adventure, covering all the main episodes, with much detail heroism and danger about man's encounter with devoted to the Mediterranean campaigns in the Atlantic Ocean over two millennia. It ranges particular. He deals especially well with the widely over a series of detailed incidents with social contexts of Decatur's life, creating some the theme of the North Atlantic, but always in vivid images of his daily world and the people in the background lie the dangers of the ocean that it. He adds detail to aspects of Decatur's career bred the hardy mariners who manned the that other authors have missed and he does not transatlantic ships. It is astonishingly hide from pointing out the great man's flaws comprehensive: privateers and treasure seekers, now and again. There is a nice little set of sugar and slaves, airships and naval blockades illustrations in the centre of the book and good are just some of the chapter headings. sourcing of supportive evidence in the endnotes; In the late 1990s, Malcolm Archibald curiously, there is no bibliography. made his own transformation. After many years Allison is not as much at home when of being a postman in the Scottish borders, he discussing naval matters. He provides a very decided to pursue his interest in American basic rendition of Decatur's victory over the history into higher education and became a Macedonian rather than an in-depth analysis of mature student in the history department of the opposing forces and the engagement itself. Dundee University. During his research on There is not even a battle diagram of the event, Columbus, Spanish galleys, whalers and the which, arguably, was the most memorable and tobacco trade, the author found himself drawn significant incident in Decatur's professional further and further into the fascinating world of life. Decatur subsequently lied about the strength the North Atlantic. He graduated in 2001, is of the British ship to increase his financial currently a history lecturer at a Dundee College reward, but this startling contradiction with and although this is his sixth publication, it is his Decatur's legendary sense of honour and first full length book. Such changes of career are devotion to his country, the strongest example of not taken lightly, but the quality of writing in his egoism, is one area that still begs to be this book shows that his was a wise decision. His unexplored. The author should also have looked writing credentials were recently strengthened more deeply into the details of the War of 1812, when, against a record two hundred and forty which would have helped him to avoid such competing authors, he won the 2005 Dundee misconceptions as "Eleven thousand men on Book Prize with his first novel, set around the sixteen ships commanded by Sir George Prévost whaling industry in the 1860s and loosely based prepared to take control of Lake Champlain [in on his fourth-year dissertation. 1814]" (150). This book is a history of how men Still, the book is a page-turner, being from the Chesapeake, Solway and Seville, the easy to read and informative. For those readers Scouser, the Nova Scotian bluenose and the who are meeting the subject for the first time, down east Yankee transformed the Atlantic from Allison's Decatur is among the best biographies an impenetrable barrier into a route to riches and available. a highway for trade. It covers Atlantic exploration and exploitation, fighting and Robert Malcomson fishing, from the slavers and their cargo of St. Catharines, Ontario shame to luxury cruises on Cunard's steamships. The author has delved deeply into the challenges Book Reviews 55 that faced the earliest Atlantic explorers. He modestly priced and highly entertaining book cites the ancient Greeks, accustomed only to the that would appeal to the general reader interested perils of rowing along dangerous coasts, but who in maritime history. There is an interesting but passed from the welcoming rich-blue quirky glossary, but individual subjects of Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar special interest to the reader would have to be into the huge swells of the Ocean Sea. The identified through the chapter headings as, Vikings, whose seafaring vocabulary is still unfortunately, there is no index. An extensive found in modern Gaelic maritime phrases as a four-page bibliography partially compensates for linguistic DNA across forty generations, taught this. Across the Pond represents a considerable the land-based Celts how to sail into the northern academic achievement for a new author, of Atlantic. Nor does Archibald neglect perhaps the whom we shall hear more in the future, and it most accomplished sailors of all, the fifteenth- makes a valuable contribution to maritime century Portuguese navigational pioneers who history. ventured into the grey and stormy southern Atlantic to discover the western coast of Africa. Michael Clark Some of the stories of Cabot and London, UK Hudson, and the many contenders for the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic, have been told elsewhere. This is the first time, however, they Robert J. Cressman. USS Ranger, 1934-1946: have been gathered together in such detail in one The Navy's First Flattop from Keel to Mast. book and written about from an individual point Washington, DC: Potomac Books Inc., of view. Among those who particularly www.potomocbooksinc.com, 2003. xiv+451 pp., captivated the author were the "Packet Rats" - a photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. tough bunch of hard working Liverpool men US $26.95, paper; ISBN 1-56488-519-7. who would board the packet ships bound for New York in their bare feet with nothing more Robert Cressman, a well-known naval author than a knife and a little food. The author relates with several books to his credit working out of the inequality of more recent times, when the the Naval Historical Center in Washington DC, two members of the British Parachute Regiment, turns his attention to the US Navy's first one an officer and the other a sergeant, rowed purpose-built aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger. across the Atlantic in 1966, yet received Ranger, launched at Newport News on 25 different classes of medal despite their February, 1933, was small in comparison to achievement being identical. The book contains contemporary cruiser-conversions such as USS many good descriptions and histories of different Lexington and USS Saratoga and never achieved classes of vessels, such as the clipper designs the same notoriety from its peace- and war-time which first recognizes that the speed of a sailing service. This book presents for the first time a ship depended on its taper aft. When large comprehensive and lively history of the ship, the waves, known as green man-killers, broke on the men who served aboard, and the planes which stern and rushed the length of the ship, they flew from her, based upon detailed research into often swept the unwary into the scuppers or at available primary documentation and worst, overboard. photographs. The author has successfully researched Cressman divides the chapters into two his sources and his material is well organized. parts; first chronicling pre-war activities, and The style of the work is fresh and very different then the ship's war service after US entry into from the usual brief histories. The events he has the war in late 1941. Ranger took part in several chosen to highlight are viewed objectively, fleet and tactical exercises during the second half immediately recognizable and presented in a of the 1930s, including Fleet Problems XVI realistic, convincing and sympathetic way. There through XIX, as the US Navy worked out how are many relevant illustrations, including carrier aviation could be best integrated into fleet photographs taken by the author himself. It is a operations. Air and ship crews practice and 56 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

experimented with flying aircraft off the ship to the text and make excellent use of the book's distant targets and witnessed first hand the larger format. Cressman has been relentless in transition from slow, cumbersome biplanes to tracking down minor details and ensuring newer single-wing fighters and dive-bombers accuracy in both his textual and visual sources. designed specifically for naval service, such as In terms of research and presentation, the Grumman Wildcat, Avenger, and Hellcat as Cressman has established a higher standard for well as the Douglas Dauntless. Distractions ship histories with this book on Ranger. It included cold weather trials in Alaskan waters, combines popular story-telling without the fruitless naval search for missing celebrity sacrificing academic rigour. Potomoc Books flyer Amelia Earhart, and the ship's brief role in (formerly Brassey's) has done a good job on lay• a Hollywood movie. As the United States was out, though the paperback edition appears to reluctantly drawn into war, Ranger was wear quickly. A few line drawings showing the transferred to the Atlantic to enforce President technical changes and alterations to Ranger over Franklin Roosevelt's neutrality patrols and the course of the ship's operational service life remained one of the few aircraft carriers might have been a good addition. This book available to ward off the threat of possible complements other recent historical work such German surface raiders. Ranger later provided as Thomas Wildenberg's biography of Admiral cover and support against the Vichy French fleet Joseph Reeves (also published and distributed during the American landings in North Africa in through Brassey's and warranting at least an 1942, joined the British Home Fleet at Scapa advertisement or mention in Cressman's book). Flow for air strikes against German shipping American carrier aviation underwent remarkable along the coast of Norway, and finally trained changes in technology and doctrine during this numerous air units and crews for service in the two-decade period, as reflected in the design and Pacific and elsewhere. Despite limitations in employment of Ranger. Cressman, Wildenberg, design and construction which restricted and other naval historians convincingly show operational employment, Ranger performed that the foundation for wartime successes in varied tasks and duties essential to the war at carrier aviation stretched back to the days when sea. Given the right people and definite jobs to Ranger was first launched. Thus, Ranger do, even an older, partly-obsolescent aircraft becomes an interesting single-ship microcosm of carrier remained relevant and useful. significant developments in carrier aviation over This book aspires to be more than just this important time period. This book will appeal a straightforward ship history. Cressman sets to a specialist audience as well as the interested bigger events and deployments within a general reader. narrative full of stories about people and the human side of those who came into contact with Chris Madsen Ranger and her airplanes. The detail is both Toronto, Ontario impressive and at times daunting. In addition to reports and reminiscences from American sailors and flyers, Cressman, for instance, describes the Nicholas Blake. Steering to Glory. A Day in the reaction of French pilots to flying against Life of a Ship of the Line. London; Chatham aircraft from Ranger and records the names of Publishing, www.chathampublishing.com, 2005. German aircrew lost in air-to-air combat over 304 pp., illustrations, appendices, notes, Norway. Among the most interesting are the bibliography, index. UK £19.99, cloth; ISBN 1- experiences of American flyers who were shot 86176-177-5. down and entered into enemy captivity in North Africa and Norway. The inevitable crashes of At the end of the eighteenth century, the Royal airplanes onto the carrier deck also receive Navy, along with its associated institutions, was ample consideration, if for no other reason than the largest industrial organization in Britain. By a good documentary trail exists. Numerous large 1810, in the thick of the Napoleonic Wars, it had photographs with excellent captions complement grown even larger. This period, that of the Book Reviews 57

Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, has while under the strict regulations and customs of fascinated historians for almost two centuries the Navy. and, because of the profound influence of the With this work the author has dispelled Royal Navy on the outcome of the wars, much a number of myths that have enveloped his attention has been focused on British sea power. subjects in the past and, if he is not able to Virtual libraries have been written concerning all eliminate a misconception, he will explain it. For matters pertaining to the Navy and the book example, we are given plausible explanations for under review will be a welcome addition to this how the "holystone" got its name and that when body of work. the jolly boat was transporting animals, it was This book is written in an quasi- know as the "blood" boat. He also points out that narrative style and to facilitate the text's flow, the ambiguity of some standing orders making the author has created a fictitious 74-gun ship, them impossible to obey; for example, the crew HMS Splendid, with a fictitious crew and placed would be instructed to wash their clothes even her with a fleet of RN ships that is on blockade though there was neither time nor space enough duty in the Mediterranean Sea. The date is June to do so, yet those who did not manage the task 1810, and she has been dispatched to Minorca to were subject to punishment. obtain fleet supplies - water, beef and One of the more interesting subjects vegetables. Here the fiction ends; all the events Blake tackles is feeding the crew. He offers us cited in the book are based on the experiences of more than the minimal "salt meat on certain days real people and the service histories of actual and fresh when it could be got," for as well as ships which the copious end notes elaborate in considering the customary Navy provisions, he detail. It is fitting that Blake fabricated a 74-gun studies in depth how fresh meat (in the form of ship as his literary vehicle: not only were these live oxen), was obtained, transported, cared for, vessels the most successful battleships in the RN slaughtered, butchered, cooked and served. He at the time and, therefore, the most numerous, also analyses the cooking capacity of the ship's but also, blockading enemy ports was one of stove, considering that some six hundred men their fundamental functions. had to be fed. By contrast, and as the crew of the Generally, Blake examines the ship was divided into a hierarchical system, conditions under which officers and men lived albeit with some ill-defined areas, Blake and worked while at war at sea aboard one of explains not only how eating habits differed His Majesty's ships, and in so doing, he among the officers and crew but also how this scrutinizes many subjects, some familiar, some affected their lives and finances. For the obscure. All of his subjects have been commander, who was at the top of the pyramid thoroughly researched from which we may and expected to entertain important people, the derive some new insight that could change our contrast is extreme. thinking about these conditions. This is the value A less discussed problem concerning of this book and here his sources are of shipboard life was lighting the ship, particularly particular interest because, along with the usual below deck, and how the lack of adequate Admiralty Regulations and Instructions, letters, lighting affected the lives of the crew. This was memoirs and reminiscences, Blake relies heavily a common problem both ashore and afloat, but on the records of courts-martial. These records the problem was exacerbated by the risk of fire are important; the Admiralty bureaucracy was aboard a wooden vessel. Here the courts martial punctilious by nature, especially in the case of records show their worth as darkness incubates courts-martial where punishment was being crime. Blake describes how the Navy issued inflicted or death sentences imposed, as they lanterns, oil and candles to minimally light their may have had to justify their decisions. From the vessels and analyses the amount of candles court martial records we get a detailed glimpse issued to the Navy in contrast to the amount into the day-to-day life aboard ship because they required by the army. concern every aspect of the lives of real human These are but a few examples of what beings who were going about their business is to be found in this work and they are given to 58 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord show the diversity of the author's effort. way south. When bad weather interrupted a However, despite the wealth of information planned pendulum experiment in southernmost available here and in other sources, it seems New Zealand, Malaspina cancelled the there is still much to know about life in the experiment and head back across the Tasman Royal Navy and I expect that without Sea to Australia. Alarmed by the newly experiencing it ourselves we will never properly established British colony in New South Wales, grasp social and working conditions aboard ship. which posed a direct threat to Spain's three Perhaps this is one reason why history is so hundred-year-old hegemony of the Pacific, fascinating. In all events, this is an interesting Malaspina intended to take a secret look at the book and it is highly recommended as it goes a new penal settlement. Britain, friendly to Spain, long way to further this understanding. had been given prior notice of his coming, and Port Jackson furnished him with a very John McKay welcoming reception. As one of the earliest Langley, British Columbia foreign visitors, Malaspina provides a fresh and informative description of the new colony, enhanced by the editors with excellent Andrew David, Felipe Fernândez-Armesto, illustrations from the expedition's artists. Carlos Novi, and Glyndwyr Williams, eds. The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794: Journal of His next stop, at Vava'u, the the Voyage of Alejandro Malaspina, Volume HI, northernmost of the Tonga Islands, was the only Manila to Cadiz, London: The Hakluyt Society, occasion when the expedition experienced the www.Hakluyt.com, in association with the full hospitality and allurement of a tropical Museo Naval, and with the assistance of the paradise. History is replete with other and earlier Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, both of accounts of the exotic societies of the South Madrid, translated by Sylvia Jamieson, 2004. xxi Pacific, but here for the first time is an Iberian + 487 pp., illustrations, charts, maps, account of the delights of Cythera. As a knight bibliography, index. £55.00, cloth. ISBN 0 of Malta, Malaspina had sworn an oath of 904180 84 0. celibacy, and naturally expected a high degree of decorum from his fellow officers, but he was This third and final volume of the journal of aghast at the unseemly behaviour of his men. Alejandro Malaspina, commander of the last More important to readers, however, is his major Spanish expedition to the Pacific from interesting account of the hospitality of the local 1789 to 1794, covers the return voyage back chief, who not only assisted him with obtaining from the Philippines. It takes in the passage water and the selection of a site for the south to New Zealand, a visit to the recently observatory, but also provided a cornucopia of established British penal colony in New South victuals for the two corvettes. Despite Wales, a three-week stay in the Vava'u group of reciprocating the chiefs hospitality Malaspina the Tonga Islands and the return via Spanish feared the consequences of too long a stay and South American ports to the home country. A sailed as soon as supplies were complete. number of appendices flesh out the sparse details Suddenly things started to go badly of the narrative for the reader. This fine volume wrong. Soon after leaving Vava'u, for reasons fully lives up to the standards established by the that he does not explain, Malaspina was previous two. Not only are the illustrations confronted by a virtual mutiny involving both impeccable, but the translation is excellent. In his seamen and the officers. Now in their fourth the earlier volumes, the editors resorted to a year at sea, desertion among the men had been cabal of translators, but this one is the work of rife. But why did the officers rebel? No doubt Sylvia Jamieson, whose unique contribution is other still-untranslated Spanish accounts will acknowledged on the title page. reveal more, but at the moment, English readers After leaving the Philippines, have only one source to go by, Enrique Porrua's Malaspina's two corvettes slowly worked their The Diary of Antonio de Tova (2001), which is Book Reviews 59 a complete blank from the time the ships reached importance , but childishly inexperienced in the Vava'u until this officer had recovered his ways of court politics, Malaspina sought royal composure a full year later. There was clearly assistance to replace the existing administration. something amiss. Malaspina had already Quickly betrayed by a lady-in-waiting, he found abandoned a planned visit to Tahiti, but instead himself instead, stripped of all rank and of continuing to the southern Chilean port of sentenced to life imprisonment. Eventually after Conception, Malaspina made for the more seven years in a cold and draughty cell in northerly port of Callao, where he would have northern Spain, friends in Italy, through the the support of a stronger military garrison. The personal intervention of Napoleon Bonaparte, mutinous outbreak had so seriously unnerved obtained his release. But he died a broken man. him, that upon arrival he immediately fled to the His arch-enemy Godoy, Carlos IV's seclusion of a monastery to recover his prime minister, saw to it that all mention of equilibrium, leaving his officers and men free to Malaspina's name was expurgated from the roam the town. record, and only Galiano and Valdés' account of Even in Callao Malaspina's troubles their side trip to British Columbia (to counter the were not over. While there, he received news of publication of George Vancouver's journal) the declaration of war by a republican France. appeared in book form. Fortunately, work went Although enemy incursion into the Pacific was ahead with the engraving of his hydrographie unlikely, Malaspina dared not jeopardize the charts and the sketches of his artists. irreplaceable scientific and political collection he Dolores Higueras adds a detailed had amassed at such great effort over so many catalogue of the multitude of source documents years. His two corvettes were prepared for war and their many locations. In the years since and made their separate ways around the Horn, dispersal, these have found many different rendezvousing again at Montevideo. By now his homes, and the process of retrieval is still in manning problems had reached epidemic progress with interesting finds still surfacing. proportions, and he was forced to recruit a Her appendix will provide an indispensable tool motley batch of ill-disciplined seamen for the for future generations of scholars. Other final leg across the Atlantic. There were a few appendices include Bustamente's survey of the ships in port that needed escort, and thus we find Malvinas, (of interest to British readers due to him as the humble commander of a small the 1980s Falkland Islands conflict), and there is convoy of merchant sail working its slow way full coverage of the ships and officers by across the Atlantic. The protection rendered by Admiral Gonzâlez-AIler, the recently-retired his two vessels was augmented by the addition director of the Museo Naval in Madrid. of the frigate Santa Gertrudis, still in South It is invidious to find fault with such a American waters after earlier having added fine and scholarly production, but two weakness strength to Quadra's negotiations with are worth mentioning. Nowhere in the three Vancouver at Nootka. But relations between volumes are the official Instructions to the Malaspina and his officers were such that two of expedition specifically spelt out. This leaves the them preferred to take passage in the frigate. editors free to chop and choose which they wish Malaspina's journal ends here but this to comment upon. Thus the reader is left with no was not the end of the story. In the appendices, way of knowing how well Malaspina and his editor Carlos Novi and others recount the sad subordinates carried out their orders, or of fate of the leader and the dispersal of his comparing them with those of other expeditions. wonderful collection. Spain had invested much A more minor fault is that, in translating the in this successor to Cook's expeditions and biographies of Malaspina's officers, many are Malaspina's arrival was anxiously awaited at prefixed with the term 'Executive Branch'. This court. Ushered into the royal presence, instead of is not strictly correct. Unlike the British system, concentrating on publishing his report, he Spanish naval officers were divided into two foolishly plunged into palace intrigue. Filled categories: oftciales de guerra, who had to be of with an overweening sense of his own noble birth and to provide documentary proof of 60 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

such before being admitted to naval college; and and Chesley Sanger have maintained a very high pilotos, the pilots, officers of lower status but level of research and writing regarding sealing consummate, well-trained seamen qualified to and whaling conducted from Newfoundland and command ships at sea. Pilots provided much of Labrador. This book is no exception. In fact, in the "grunt" work undesired by their more one hundred and fifty pages Dickinson and aristocratic colleagues. There was never any Sanger provide an outstanding overview of the equivalent in the British system. intricate, complex history of shore station This three-volume work, executed with whaling in two regions of Canada - such painstaking thoroughness by so many Newfoundland/Labrador and the area around international scholars, is a major contribution to Vancouver in British Columbia. More usefully, the history of discovery, although it is but the tip they discuss the interrelationship between these of the iceberg. Malaspina had planned a seven- two regions in terms of transfer of labour and volume work, with additional volumes devoted expertise. Some seven years ago both authors to the work of his artists and an atlas of his used this Journal as a podium for their treatise charts, and possibly others covering special on the final phase of shore-station whaling in aspects of their findings. Malaspina's had been Newfoundland and Labrador during the period not so much been a voyage of discovery, as a 1951-1972. In a sense, this present publication much needed scientific, economical and political should be seen as a "prequel" to that study. examination of the Spanish Empire, undertaken The history of shore-station whaling in at a time when major reforms were obviously Canada is complex; it not only encompasses a required. He has only himself to blame, fairly long period (1896-1972), but includes however, that it has taken two hundred years for several dozen larger and smaller companies that his observations to see find light of day. The were involved in the industry. Moreover, a fairly journal opens a fascinating door on the wide variety of whale species were hunted and previously secretive world of the Spanish processed. Finally, although locally based, Empire when it was almost at the apogee of its shore-station whaling must be characterized as power. A few short years later, the whole edifice being internationally focussed, be it with regard was to crumble into dust. to the nationalities involved in the industry or There are flaws in the expeditions of the foreign markets for which oil, baleen and all great explorers, but Malaspina's journal is a guano were produced. Taking all these elements worthy successor to those of Capt. James Cook, in consideration, I can only but admire the two the man he so sought to emulate. As such, this authors for the concise yet detailed and complete work should make a valued addition to the way they have put together the story. In ten bookshelf of all serious students of the history of chapters they discuss the establishment of the the Pacific. many different companies starting with the Cabot Steam Whaling Company and the first fin John Crosse whale killed off Baccalieu Island on June 26th, Vancouver, British Columbia 1896, their organisation, the involvement of Norwegian entrepreneurship and capital, the catch results and the economic importance of Anthony B. Dickinson and Chesley W. Sanger. these companies for input (local employment) and output (revenues of the transport of whaling Twentieth Century Shore Station Whaling in products to foreign markets, especially Newfoundland and Labrador. Montreal, QC: Scotland). McGill-Queen's University Press, www.mqup.ca, 2005. xvii + 254 pp., maps, After periods of expansion and illustrations, tables, appendices, notes, consolidation between 1898-1902, the industry bibliography, index. CDN $49.95, cloth; ISBN grew in the following years until it reached the 0-7735-2881-4. peak in catches and net profits in 1904. From the onset, the business was a big success. However, Over the last two decades or so Tony Dickinson as in Norway some fifteen years earlier, success Book Reviews 61

was met by fierce criticism from locals who mentioned. feared for their own fisheries. They objected to This book provides great reading for the whaling companies' practice of disposing of many different audiences with varied interests whale carcasses by leaving them afloat and thanks to Dickinson and Sanger's prolific use of complained about the resulting stench as they primary and secondary sources. Historians, decayed. Thirdly, the rate at which whales were economists, environmentalists but also being taken elicited comments in local genealogists will enjoy the fruits of their newspapers about the increasing need for academic endeavours. Numerous people are regulation. As early as 28 July 1898, the St. mentioned in the text and appendices. Statistical John's Evening Herald stated: "We may soon information concerning workmen's wages, expect the inevitable 'crank' advocating the catches, catchers used is smartly interwoven in legislation to prevent the killing of these huge chapters and presented in full in separate tables. monsters on the ground that the present industry Each chapter contains a summary facilitating the will exterminate them" (28). understanding of the general outline of the story. And legislation came in 1902 and In book reviews it might be customary to seek 1904. On 22 April 1902, the House of Assembly shortcomings but the only one I could find does passed an Act intended to conserve stocks and not relate to the contents, but to the wrapping. sustain shore-station whaling in Newfoundland Luckily, the sober, dare I say fairly poor, lay-out and Labrador. The Act had serious short falls: by no means diminishes the richness of sources the killing of females was not prohibited, the and data at hand. catch per licensee was not restricted, nor was the number of licenses. The Act, however, did Joost C.A. Schokkenbroek stipulate that the whole whale carcass should be Amsterdam, The Netherlands utilized. This lead to the installment of guano plants to use whale meat as basis for fertilizer and feed. Eric J Grove. 77;e Royal Navy since 1815. A New A first decline in the whaling industry Short History. London & New York: Palgrave set in 1905 and lasted over a decade (until 1917). Macmillan, www.palgrave-usa.com, 2005. 224 Mainly as a result of substantial financial pp., bibliography, index. US $23.95, paper, involvement of the company of Christian $75.00, cloth; ISBN 0-333-72126-8. Salvesen renewal and revitalization of the whaling industry in Newfoundland and Labrador On 15 July 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte took place between 1918 and 1951. This was surrendered to Captain Maitland of HMS followed by a second and fatal decline from Bellerophon in Basque Roads, and was carried 1952 to the total abandonment of shore station first to Plymouth and then into acrimonious exile whaling in 1972. The Epilogue contains an on St Helena. If the summer of 1815 was the impressively condensed account of the current Royal Navy's greatest moment, in 1816 its state of affairs concerning the international ability to deliver power ashore, the central theme regulation of whale hunting. of its activity for the next ninety-eight years, was A first glimpse at the table of contents brutally demonstrated off Algiers. Dr Grove's leads one to assume that Dickinson and Sanger's book nearly starts with the story of how the discussion of the rise and fall of each individual Royal Navy attacked and battered the capital of company would be dangerously repetitious. Not an Islamic country. It ends before another only do they masterfully avoid repetition, but example of the same activity, so the last episode they also tempt fate by daring to devote a is how the Royal Navy participated in chapter to the rise and fall of one particular bombarding Serbia as HMS Splendid made a station - the one based at Aquaforte and run by significant contribution to the air campaign with Andreas Ellefsen from Stokke, Norway. This her Tomahawks, re-supplying from US missile reviewer could hardly discern any overlap with stocks in theatre. How are the mighty fallen. preceding chapters where Aquaforte is That the Algiers assault was also an allied 62 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord operation, for Exmouth's fleet included a identifying its potential readership. In Britain we substantial Dutch component, is not mentioned. seem to find the navy a problem, illustrated by So if Algiers is an example of the supersession the slightly embarrassed tone of the celebrations of Dutch sea power by British, so Serbia is a around the two-hundredth anniversary of telling example of the RN's supersession by the Trafalgar. The navy is associated with much that USN. we find difficult today. It had a habit of beating In 1815, the Royal Navy had reached a people who are now friends and partners. The level of global authority that has only, perhaps, Royal Navy has strong imperial overtones; been exceeded by the United States Navy in the indeed, much of the story in the nineteenth last ten years. That position of authority was century is of the Navy travelling the world and sustained for nearly a hundred years, and then imposing western values like the abolition of the declined and disappeared over the next thirty. slave trade, or western power on the inhabitants Nonetheless, the Royal Navy remained, at least of foreign lands. It was the principle shield of until the end of the Second World War, the Empire, and as long as the navy remained United Kingdom's principle line of defence. It dominant, the Empire was secure. When that absorbed a large proportion of the state's annual power waned, the Empire went with it. The budget. It almost always used the most advanced navy's stock-in-trade was (and is) technology available either in Britain or the violence—.and it was usually good at it. It was world. It played a central role in the United a very male institution, with women conspicuous Kingdom ' s defence, and was a maj or component by their absence, except as a source of ship's in Britain's economy and industry. It ran the names. world's largest industrial undertakings. It was So who is this book for? Not for important within British society and culture. enthusiasts: they are not going to find enough Now, none of those things are true. detail about ships, guns, engines, uniforms or Writing a history of the navy over 190 battles. Not the more politically correct: they are years gives Dr Grove a massive problem of not going to be convinced and may be revolted. compression. The history of the navy clearly Not the informed: little of this is going to be encompasses ships, policy, finance, operations, new. Perhaps it will appeal to those who want to technology, personnel, social issues within the get some feel for the navy, for instance, potential service and with society in general, industry, and recruits wishing to inform themselves before many other topics. Grove is interested in the making career decisions, or those newly joined, Royal Navy as an instrument, the policies it wishing to understand their trade. Well, those served, the ships it acquired, and the operations readers will be the better for their reading of this it undertook. In those terms, he has written a book. It is a solid competent piece of work, and, lucid and skilful account of the navy since 1815. some trivial errors apart, thoroughly to be He has a good eye for the telling detail and never recommended. It has few jokes, however, and no loses sight of the principle that the navy exists to pictures or maps. The absence of maps is a deliver national force at, by or from the sea. handicap, and the lack of pictures surprising in Grove has based his account almost a book with a hardback at such a frightening entirely on secondary sources and his mastery of price. them is thorough and effective. While one or two recent works are missing from the bibliography, Evan Davies he has embodied most recent research about the Devon, UK Navy. Grove's navy was mostly forward looking and was generally enthusiastic about the benefits of new technology. He also stresses the ongoing Christopher Hilton. Mayflower, London: Sutton challenge of changing circumstances, showing Publishing, www.suttonpublishing.co.uk, 2005. that new opportunities or problems were usually xvii + 238 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, grasped quickly and effectively. bibliography, index. UK £20.00, cloth; ISBN: 0- My difficulty with this book is 7509-3654-1. Book Reviews 63

Despite the fact that the landing of the powerful." James I, the king when the Mayflower has become the stuff of legend, it is Mayflower sailed, was frequently foiled by surprising how little we know about this historic England's powerful Parliament. Furthermore, voyage and the subsequent struggles of its James' son and grandson both lost their thrones passengers in the New World. Most of us think because of feuds with Parliament (in the English we have some knowledge of the first American civil wars and the Glorious Revolution). thanksgiving but the truth is quite different from The author's task is not an easy one: the myth. With his new book, Christopher Hilton there are disagreements about who should be seeks the reality buried beneath the folklore. included as "Pilgrim fathers," given that the Perhaps one of the most surprising Colony was forged by a rag tag and disparate things about the book is just how circuitous the group. What's more, it is not a name they would route was from England to New England for a have chosen for themselves (199-200). There are small group of marginalised Christians. Some many "blanks" in the written record and virtually tried (and failed) to make a life among the nothing is left in the way of material culture tolerant Dutch; the lengths they went to escape (206). Hilton is left to speculate about what the from their own country is shocking to our participants would have felt and experienced in modern western sensibilities. this strange new land. For instance, we know Hilton is an evocative writer, but he is very little about what the women and children not completely comfortable in this time period. thought and felt. Hitlon is right to emphasize He employs terms which are out of place in the that they all went to bed hungry on several early modern era: few - if any - historians would occasions and suffered grievously to survive. claim there was a "working class" in the first On one hand, Hilton admires the half of the sixteenth century (7). The concept of settlers' courage which ultimately helped forge "realpolitik" belongs to a later period as well. a nation: "Seldom, if ever, can so many people While he is an empathetic biographer, he doesn't from the background...have had such an always see things through the eyes of someone impact— however indirectly — on the world" who lived in the seventeenth century. Hilton's (20). Yet, he also sees their weaknesses. He subjects would not agree with his statement that mentions that they declined Captain John "The differences between the various Protestant Smith's offer to lead their trip. Smith had groups.. .and the Catholic Church were great, but explored New England, made maps and written not greater than their similarities" (33). Even a book on the subject (93). Why would they among Protestant groups, seventeenth-century decline? We are not provided with an believers thought these differences were so great explanation, but Smith asserted that their that they were willing to flee three thousand "humorous ignorance caused them for more than miles away to escape the Established Church in a year to endure a wonderful deal of misery with England. infinite patience" (95). The explanation may lie Hilton is correct to marvel at the in their inflexible character. Hilton refers to radical nature of the Mayflower Compact and the them as "bigots" (200) who chafed against settlers' desire to govern themselves. Yet, he autocracy and uniformity in England, but sought fails to see it in its larger context. Many radical to impose their own version upon their ideas came to light during the English Civil wars neighbours in New England. This suggests they and the Interregnum in the mid-seventeenth weren't very "forward" thinking at all, but century. When censorship slackened, it became rather, simply out of step with the majority of clear that English men and women could their countrymen and women in England. conceive of some political and religious models One of the most interesting aspects of that were very different from those to which they the book is Hilton's colourful descriptions and were accustomed. Perhaps the Pilgrim Fathers photographs of some of the principal sites in the didn't take such an "extraordinary mental step" Mayflower story as they are today. This is after all. Furthermore, Hilton is wrong to assert especially important, given that precious little that the rulers of England were "absolute and all has survived. The author is also very good at 64 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord portraying the isolation of the struggling colony. provinces, the federal government has only seen His useful examples show that, at best, the fit to provide meagre financial support to a colony was an afterthought to the mother largely volunteer effort to free entrapped whales. country, and that cautious relations with the This is primarily due to the fact that the one aboriginal people were both as a source of species that has not responded favourably to the survival and a constant stress. end of whaling, the Northwest Atlantic stock of Hilton demonstrates that there is a right whale, spends much of its time in the near great deal of myth that surrounds the Mayflower waters off the heavily populated Northeastern saga. For example, the Thanksgiving holiday coast of the United States. Even though it was should be credited to those settlers who spent the first to be declared endangered during the time in Holland before arriving in the New 1930s, following centuries of over fishing, the World. Furthermore, it does not seem to have stock size has remained dangerously low. This is been an annual event during the Pilgrims' day. because human-whale interactions have again Hilton, however, is not anxious to destroy the increased dramatically, with commercial myth: "myths have to be simple, to reassure and whaling being replaced by ship strikes and to give identity" ( 199). The author acknowledges entanglements. That right whales have been slow the importance of such stories in nation- to rebound has acted as a catalyst. American building. Even with the publication of books like authorities, prompted mostly by this one, the myth of the Mayflower will likely conservationists/ environmentalists, have remain intact....and maybe that's just as well. introduced legislation that has thus far proved to be more effective at threatening fishermen than Cheryl Fury protecting whales. Because the stock's annual Saint John, New Brunswick migration into Canadian waters is restricted to a relatively small portion of the Bay of Fundy during late summer and early fall, it has been Tora Johnson. Entanglements. The Intertwined relatively easy for Ottawa to impose regulations Fates of Whales and Fishermen. Gainesville, aimed at preventing collisions between ships and right whales. Other than this, there is no real FLA: University Press of Florida, Atlantic Canadian "problem" and the attempt to www.upf.com. 2005. xvi + 289 pages, link the two is an uncomfortable stretch and, illustrations, maps, references, index. US overall, a serious distraction. $29.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8130-2729-7. While one can understand why Tora Johnson tells Lloyd Sullivan, a Johnson was not able to resist the temptation of Newfoundland fisherman she met while helping describing in great detail her involvement in free a Humpback whale entangled in a gill net, often-dangerous attempts to free other species of that she is "interested in whales and fishermen, whales entangled off Newfoundland ( the same and how fishermen feel about whales" (185). His opportunities apparently were not available retort: "I'll tell you about whales. Soon, there'll south of the border), devoting no less than three be a million of 'em and no fishermen." This separate chapters to it (Chapters 2, 9 and 10) is exchange pretty well sums up Entanglements, a serious digression. No matter how informative which purports to deal with the growing clash and entertaining, it adds little to the central between whales and fishermen over the last three themes addressed in this book. Strangely, decades in Atlantic Canada and New England Johnson clearly understands this. At the very end after a moratorium on commercial whaling of the Introduction, for example, she expresses caused a dramatic increase in the former while the hope that her efforts will help " head off two the crash of ground fish stocks brought about a avoidable tragedies: the extinction of the North serious reduction in the latter. It is more an Atlantic right whale and the end of small-scale American problem, however, than Canadian. fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic" (5). While entanglements in fishing gear Johnson is well qualified to take on this have increased throughout the Atlantic important task, he hails from a long line of Book Reviews 65 fishermen, was involved in the industry, is "pouring money and person-power at the whale married to a fisherman, and over the past several problem" does not seem"to be working to years has written extensively on fisheries issues. protect whales from entanglement and fishermen She is also a marine biologist who considers from liability" (261 ). That is not to say that there herself "a conservationist" and as such has spent is no hope. She concludes with a series of much of her career "advocating for and recommendations based on well-grounded educating and writing about the natural world" principles of decision-making and management (4). This background, she claims, gained her (263-5) which, if understood and accepted by all "entrée and trust among fishermen, scientists, players, would greatly enhance the probability and environmentalists and [gave her] a uniquely that there can be a successful resolution to this broad perspective." Johnson uses a somewhat serious problem. This alone would make unique, but quite effective, multifaceted Entanglements a worthwhile purchase. Un• approach. She draws upon her knowledge and fortunately, however, this is not an unqualified experience, as well as information gleamed from recommendation. secondary sources and interviews, to achieve her The main problem is not so much with broader goals. They would have been more Johnson's interview-derived information, but easily and certainly more effectively rather her use of secondary material. Identified accomplished, however, had the discourse been only occasionally in the text, many sources are restricted to just the American problem and the poorly chosen and sometimes seriously one species of endangered whale. misinterpreted. Additionally, historical and Chapters 1 and 2 provide contextual contextual information especially is all too often underpinnings for all that follows. The growing flat out wrong. With so much "scientific" data number of entrapments in New England waters available, for instance, it is difficult to and the very earliest attempts to free entangled understand why lengthy excerpts from Herman whales in the mid-1980s are dealt with in the Melville's Moby Dick (one of the few historical former, while the biology, nature, habits, and sources cited) are used, not to indicate whaling exploitation history of the North Atlantic right practices, but rather to provide specifics on whale are considered in the latter. The following various biological characteristics of the North chapters outline how fisheries management Atlantic right whale and its feeding practices programs intended to benefit fishermen and (48-50). The author is sometimes all over the conservation legislation and practices designed place. How is it possible to reconcile the claim to protect endangered species often clash, and that right whales today are but "the ragged that attempts to reconcile the two have thus far remains of a vast tribe" with the assertion that had little success. Johnson makes the point that they "may have been relatively uncommon even she is dealing with an extremely complicated before the concerted Basque whale fishery topic, fraught with issues originating with reduced their numbers"(45)? Nor did Basques, fishermen (and their institutions and officers), Yankee and European whalers ever establish environmentalists, scientists, lawyers, politicians "seasonal tryworks for rendering blubber in and legislation (regional, state, and federal), nooks along the rocky coasts of Newfoundland fisheries officials, fisheries advocates, media ... [and] ... the remote shores of the island" (public opinion), and the population at large. (27). Even in southern Labrador, this form of This convoluted web of environmental and whaling was restricted to less than sixty years human factors that has threatened the survival of during the sixteenth century and was conducted both New England fishermen and right whales is only by the Basques (44). Neither are mistakes then examined. Johnson's anecdotal and folksy restricted to secondary sources. Johnson, style is particularly effective when describing unfortunately, also violates the old saw that the the problems underpinning this conflict, and use of flawed information provided by when discussing how they might be resolved. At informants "is your problem, not theirs." The the end of the day, though, she is forced to section dealing with the closure of the Dildo conclude that the United States' strategy of factory in Newfoundland and the actual 66 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

Canadian ban on commercial whaling, for The vessel selected was one of the instance, is incorrect (29-30). Worse still, it is cargo vessels, a knorr of about 14 metres in credited to a non-existent (improperly length. Identified as Wreck Skuldelev J, this boat identified?) informant. was an inter-island trading vessel, circa 1040 So many mistakes cannot help but cast AD with some 85 per cent of its hull surviving some degree of doubt on interpretation and the long immersion. The plan was to build a presentation of fact and process derived from copy using traditional methods and tools, and interviews and participation in conferences and then to add a conjectural sailing and rowing rig meetings, the real strength of this book. This based on what is known of the square-sail rig weakens what is, on the whole, an intelligent and and sailing methods used by the Scandinavian fair assessment of a very important topic. seafarers of that era. The team decided to make Johnson, who also teaches geographic scale models of all the surviving parts of the information science at the College of the wreck, then assemble them into a model of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, drew thirteen hull, working with the parts until both the best fit maps and eight figures which are very well and the likely construction and assembly designed (and reproduced) and add clarity to the methods had been determined. The major text. difficulty involved in the reconstruction of such vessels is the lack of contemporary drawings or Chesley W. Sanger designs, as boatwrights of the era built largely Ocean Pond, Newfoundland "by eye" and by tradition, as far as can be determined without drawings to guide their work. The modern reconstruction team, using Henrik Juel. Roar's Circle: A Viking Ship Viking-era tools, had to do everything from Returns To The Sea. Cambridge, UK: felling trees to operating the boat's sailing rig in Lutterworth Press, www, lutterworth.com. 2005. Viking fashion, relying on instinct as heavily as 160 pp., photographs, illustrations, glossary. UK the original builders. £15.00, paper; ISBN 0 7188 3045 8. To build the boat, named Roar Ege, or "Roar's Oak Ship" - soon shortened to Roar - In 1962, the hulls of five small vessels of the the Viking Ship Museum assembled a loosely- Viking era in European history, approximately knit team of enthusiasts and volunteers guided 900 to 1100 AD, were found in the mud and silt by several individuals with considerable boat• of Roskilde Fjord, in Denmark. Apparently, they building experience. Soren Vadstrup, the overall had been sunk to create a protective barrier leader, had past experience in Viking replica against seaborne raids on the thriving town of construction; Ole Crumlin-Peterson, who had Roskilde itself. One of the small vessels was a helped excavate the Roskilde ships, had founded fishing boat, two were cargo carriers of the the museum and Institute; Erik Andersen was a knorr variety, and two were "snakeships," the theorist on Viking ship technology; and lead lethal and flexible oared warships usually boatwright, Thorberg Skawhewer, brought much associated with Viking exploits. The discovery experience to leading the actual hands-on work. of these vessels led to an extensive In support of this core team, an enthusiastic archaeological excavation to recover them, party of some ten or so young volunteers followed by the creation of a Viking Ship supported the two-year construction project, Museum nearby, and of an Institute of Maritime which took place from 1982 to 1984. Archeology. In the decades following the The author, Henrik Juel, now a discovery and excavation of the Viking vessels, professor of Philosophy and Communications at both the museum and the Institute sponsored Roskilde University, was one of these various research projects, one of which was an volunteers, seen in a photograph that effort by the museum to sponsor a rebuilding of accompanies the text, as a clutch of healthy, fit a working copy of one of the vessels, by a and attractive young Scandinavians who seem volunteer shipbuilding crew. capable of building anything. Roar would try Book Reviews 67 that capability, and their patience, to their limits. the ship to keep the windward luff of the sail Although a number of the volunteers had worked taut. The cris-crossed leather strapping known to on previous Viking ship reconstructions, none be featured on Viking sails is not in evidence had experienced the from-the-tree immersion in either. They are small technical points in an Viking methods the building of Roar was meant otherwise impressive achievement in the to require. The initial challenge to both construction and operation of a thousand-year- experienced and novice volunteers alike was to old boat design. For Juel, who came to the learn and understand the design, nature and use project without knowing how to hold axe, and of traditional ship-building tools from a 1,000- who is now the offshore coxswain of Roar Ege, year-old tradition, and then to apply them in the building the boat was clearly a labour of love, as construction of an historical vessel that required it must have been for all his agreeable them to approach a skill level similar to that of companions in the project. Reading about it is no long-dead boatwrights for whom this had been a less a pleasure. life-long practice. Juel's book takes the reader through Victor Suthren the construction of the boat in a novel way. Merrickville, Ontario Rather than simply record the process, Juel sets the work in its actual context, in the fluid and often hilarious ebb and flow of the human Ann Larabee. The Dynamite Fiend Halifax: relationships between the builders. Dialogue Nimbus Publishing Ltd., www.nimbus.ns.ca, and reveals as much about the young personalities New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 234 pp., and their interaction as it does about the photos, notes, index. $29.95, cloth; ISBN 1- technical problems being addressed and solved. 55109-531-9 (Halifax edition) and ISBN 1- As a result, Roar's Circle tells us as much about 4039-6794-6 (New York edition). the lives, loves and feelings of an appealing group of young people as it does about the The Dynamite Fiend is a biography of Alexander construction of a 1,000-year-old boat design. Keith Jr, a villain who committed serious crimes The reader is charmed by both. - forgery, embezzlement and murder (or perhaps The hull construction of Roar relied it was manslaughter). A strange character, he upon the physical reality of the wreck to guide was an apparently dedicated family man, who the work, and that gave a solid basis to the delighted in secrets and conspiracies and lived claims of authenticity for the reconstruction. much of his life under assumed names. He could Where the replica's rebirth becomes problematic be extremely hospitable and charming and was is in the conjectural reconstruction of the able to fool many people much of the time. His vessel's sailing rig. The rig of Roar is the place in Canadian maritime history is due to his traditional single square sail known to have been involvement with Confederate blockade runners used by Viking vessels of the era, but the lifts, passing through Halifax during the American braces, sheets and fittings of the rig have no Civil War and the Chesapeake incident of 1864. precedent in eleventh century examples, and are His final criminal efforts involved planting time largely based on square-rig ship technology of a bombs on transatlantic liners in order to collect later era. As an example, the builders insurance on cargo purported to be on board. commendably used close-woven wool for their None succeeded but during the last attempt, his sail, but the sail fittings inexplicably are more of infernal machine blew up on the dock at Bremen the sixteenth century than the eleventh. Reef before it could be loaded on to the liner Mosel, points are provided, both near the head of the killing eighty-one people and injuring another sail and near the foot, and in place of the beitass, fifty. Keith then tried to commit suicide by firing or a long bearing-out pole which fitted into and two pistol bullets into his head but did not die advanced the windward clew of the sail to allow for another five days. There is no doubt that he tacking, the riggers of Roar relied on a very was the perpetrator of the crime. Renaissance bowline leading to the forepart of Alexander Keith Jr, born in 1827, was 68 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

known as Sandy to distinguish him from his interesting parts of the book, involving uncle Alexander Keith, the brewer and Confederate and Union agents and code- prominent citizen of Halifax. He was first breakers. Keith appears to have kept most of the employed by his uncle and lived in his Hollis money that had been entrusted to him. When the Street house (which still exists) but in 1863, war ended, he fled from New York to St. Louis probably after appropriating some of his uncle's to escape the men he had swindled and then to money, he set up on his own. He worked in the small town of Highland, Missouri. There, partnership with Benjamin Wier as an agent for one of his creditors caught up with him and blockade-running Confederate vessels and extracted $10,000 out of $40,000 owed - an generally assisted Confederate agents passing immense sum at the time and equivalent to through Halifax. He became known as the millions today. Appearing to be a wealthy man, Confederate consul, an unofficial designation in Highland Keith met and married a young probably promoted by himself. The author Frenchwoman, Cecelia Paris, an accomplished plainly does not like Sandy Keith and usually young lady who was fluent in French, English refers to him in rather contemptuous terms. She and German. Keith, or Thompson as he should also seems to consider all the southerners whom now be called, also started to learn German from he entertained as moral reprobates and poseurs. Swiss settlers in Highland. To my mind this is a bit overdone, although it In January 1866, the Thompsons does not mean that Keith was in any way moved to Germany and settled in Dresden, virtuous. For example, he handled large amounts where they were welcomed into the expatriate of Confederate money, a lot of which stuck to community in that city. Over the next few years his own fingers. they had three children. "Thompson" appeared In December 1863, the coastal to be an affluent American who made frequent passenger steamer Chesapeake was seized mysterious business trips, some across the shortly after leaving New York, bound for Atlantic. The author could not find out just what Maine. She was hijacked by a group of men, he was doing on these missions, but the family including several Maritimers, who claimed to be fortune was in steady decline. This led to his Confederate privateers. Eventually, the ship desperate attempts to sabotage transatlantic arrived at Sambro Harbour, near Halifax, short liners in which he had shipped valueless but of coal. Here they were trapped by a Union heavily-insured cargo. He obtained timing gunboat; the crew abandoned ship and only one mechanisms from a clockmaker, who seemed man was captured by the gunboat's crew. There not at all suspicious of his motives. The author were international complications to this affair thinks he might have been involved in the and it was agreed that the man, George Wade, a disappearance of the Inman liner City ofBoston, New Brunswicker, would be handed over to but there is no evidence of that. The first known Halifax authorities. When Wade was brought attempt was on the North German Lloyd ship ashore, a group of men, including Sandy Keith, Rhein. The bomb did not go off and had to be attacked the constable who tried to arrest him. retrieved in New York by an accomplice. The Wade escaped in a fast skiff manned by two second target was the White Star liner Celtic. champion rowers. All the Chesapeake "pirates," Keith, now using the name Thomas, joined her as the Unionists called them, were spirited away at Liverpool, intending to get off at Cork, but from the area by Sandy Keith, Benjamin Wier when that call was cancelled, he had to retrieve and friends. Ms Larabee does not make a lot of his device from the hold and disarm it, this episode, but Keith was much involved. jettisoning the dynamite through his porthole at night. The third attempt, in December 1875, was During this period, Sandy Keith the North German Lloyd Mosel, when the travelled to Montreal, Philadelphia and New stevedores dropped the bomb on the wharf York under the name of Thompson, attempting resulting in the carnage described above and or purporting to buy equipment, even Keith's suicide. locomotives, to be shipped to Halifax and then on to the South. This is one of the most The author's research in Germany, Book Reviews 69

America and Canada has resulted in detailed narrative that moves swiftly from place to place accounts of these events. German police records and, along the way, tells a deeply personal story were still all available and included reports from of hope, triumph and loss. Sweden was neutral the Pinkerton agency. Keith's gross habits come during the Second World War, but its vessels in for a lot of comment but he was able to within the Allied blockade of the Baltic could impress people at all levels of society and was trade between Denmark and the German North obviously a plausible rogue. The Dynamite Sea, while those outside traded with the Allies. Fiend is an interesting account of a nineteenth- Both areas were profitable for shipowners with century Nova Scotian rascal. earnings up to 700 per cent higher than before the war and increased war bonuses for the crews Charles D. Maginley of 300 per cent. Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia Of particular interest to maritime historians is AL's involvement in merchant shipping at the end of two wars, forty-five years Arne Larsson. Ships and Friendships. Leicester, apart, the Second World War and the Cold War. U.K: Troubador Publishing, In 1946, the United States, in order to assist www.troubador.co.uk, 2004. xii + 392 pp., Europe's recovery and prevent a world slump, photographs, index. UK £19.99, cloth; ISBN 1- allocated by lend-lease hundreds of surplus 904744 52 4. vessels in the reserve fleet to private ship operators in Allied countries who had lost In the 1930s, a shy and awkward sixteen year- vessels during the conflict. AL foresaw how so old took a memorable voyage across the Baltic many standard cargo ships and tankers being Sea in one of his father's elderly cargo steamers. transferred to European shipowners at a fraction He was so fascinated that he vowed to leave of their cost would change the global school and join the family shipbrokerage transportation of goods and raw materials for business in Sweden. Today, few people, even ever, and that shipbrokers would become the those actively involved in merchant shipping, are catalyst between owners and shipyards, banks, fully aware of the role of a shipbroker, but in exporters and importers. Despite his father's this gripping, moving and very amusing company being blacklisted for trading with autobiography, the author recalls his career in Germany, AL managed to secure three such shipping and the massive successes he scored as ships and immediately re-sold one of them at a a shipbroker. large profit. After training in shipbroking In 1954, after being fired by his father, companies abroad, Arne Larsson or AL as he is allegedly resentful of his success, AL started to known to everyone, returned to his father's build his own shipbroking empire, with a small company in Stockholm j ust prior to the outbreak loan, a strong liver, considerable good luck and, of the Second World War. This memoir covers the most precious commodity in shipbroking, a the six decades that AL traveled the world in worldwide network of friends. As a small boy, pursuit of his business of chartering, buying, AL received some post-revolutionary Russian selling, operating, and even as a last resort, postage stamps and from that moment he owning ships. He recounts his business failures developed a passion for all things Russian and it and triumphs in South America, the United was with the Soviet Union that he developed his States, the Far East and Russia and describes the most exceptional business relationship. In the extraordinary characters that peopled his 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union faced frequent colourful life. Now in his eighties, his passion crop failures and needed to import huge amounts for shipping is undiminished and his chosen of grain from the West which could not be cable address of "Friendship" is more relevant carried solely by its depleted domestic fleet. The than ever. highly geared chartering market needed only a AL's unique perspective on the world small increase in activity to send freight rates of international shipping from 1938 results in a soaring and the Soviets regularly exploited this 70 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

fact by chartering scores more vessels than they and model makers a novel insight into the actually required, then releasing some of them technicalities of each type covered." back onto a now higher freight market. With his Contents include a forward, connections in Moscow, AL was one of the introduction, a time line of her career, design, shipbrokers who successfully anticipated these specifications, and a description of the various market peaks and troughs. Following the end of details, as well as eight pages of photographs, the Cold War and the fall of Communism, the followed by eighty-two pages of drawings, a list ruble became worthless and AL marshalled his of sources, primary and published, a contacts to organize finance for huge shipping bibliography and acknowledgements. projects in the newly independent states, earning Being well acquainted with the ship large commissions from all sides. and much of the material available, it is my The general reader may not learn much opinion that the author has simply retold the about the mechanics of shipbroking from this story in a different format. Had Marquardt used book, but the foundation of the author's deals, the wealth of information available on the large and small, was the shipbroker's creed that subject, instead of limiting his research to the originated in London's eighteenth century coffee sources listed (plus F. Alexander Magoun's The houses - our word our bond. Affairs of the heart Frigate Constitution, mentioned in his end notes also play a prominent part in Arne Larsson's and text, but not listed in his sources), the book intriguing tale, which makes parts of it read like could have been better. Lloyds' List meets Hello Magazine, e writes Considering the inaccuracies, errors frankly and openly about his four marriages and and incorrect terminology, it falls well short of a string of international affairs, many of whom its intended aim. On page 7, the author lists are cited in the book's dedication. Nevertheless, Chesapeake as being one of the first six frigates he has successfully used his sources and in the US Navy. Two pages later he states; "In organized his material into an objective maritime June 1807 the British Frigate Leopard fired on biography. Although the index lists only people the American merchantman Chesapeake in and ships, and the illustrations are from his search of deserters..." referring to the well family album, the book is a fascinating known incident between USS Chesapeake and contribution to a lesser known aspect of HMS Leopard when Leopard stopped maritime history. It is well worth the cover price, Chesapeake requesting the return of four men for both the general reader of history and the accused of being British deserters. Commodore maritime historian. Barron of Chesapeake refused. Leopard then fired three broadsides into Chesapeake, killing Michael Clark three and wounding eighteen, including Barron. London, UK Chesapeake, with only one exception, did not return fire. Barron ordered that her colours be struck, and Leopard again boarded and took the Karl Heinz Marquardt. Anatomy ofthe Ship. The four men off. In one place, the author refers to 44-gun Frigate Constitution. Annapolis, MD; the Dey of Algiers as the Bay of Algiers (8) US Naval Institute Press, www.usni.org, 2005. when discussing the Treaty between the US and 128 pp., photographs, tables, drawings, sources, Algiers. He also refers to Constitution as bibliography. US $ 42.95, cloth: ISBN 1-59114- "knotting at one time 9 miles an hour"(18). In 250-4. one place he refers to the spar deck as the spare deck (24) and in another, hawse pipes are called The dust jacket indicates, "This highly iron hawse-hole sleeves (27). acclaimed series aims to provide the finest While discussing launching problems, documentation of individual ships and ship types under the date 1797, Marquardt indicates ever published." It continues: "The drawings are "Excessive pressure on the ship's keel during accurate, visually exiting and totally extra weeks on the (launching) slip brought on a comprehensive, offering ship buffs, historians permanent hog (bent keel)" (10). What he fails Book Reviews 71 to mention, however, is that Humphreys (her with the photographs, literature and drawings." designer) was not concerned, since, following The back of the dust jacket claims that her launch, he wrote to the secretary of war the author has produced "for the first time an indicating; ".. .that without straining or hogging accurate set of plans for the frigate as she would more than one & a quarter of an inch, as you will have appeared during the Anglo-American see by the enclosed certificate." Over War." In fact, the plans and book by Laurence Constitution's two-hundred year career, the hog Arnot titled USS Constitution 1812-1815 increased to fourteen inches. While recognizing published by Bluejacket Shipcrafters in 1991 the 1992-1995 rebuild, Marquardt does not was published fourteen years earlier. Preparation mention that one objective was to remove the of the plans and book included extensive hog as far as possible, using a framed study consultation with three of USS Constitution's model of Humphrey's original design, built by former commanding officers, including Cdr the Naval Historical Center Detachment in Tyrone G. Martin, author of the definitive Boston. A supporting document prepared by history of the ship - A Most Fortunate Ship. Patrick Otton, titled "USS Constitution - Martin also supervised the overhaul of the ship Rehabilitation and Restoration," details the for the nation's bicentennial in 1976. Mr. strengthening initiatives undertaken to restore Donald A. Turner, director of the USS Constitution's structural integrity using Constitution Maintenance and Repair Facility Humphreys' original specifications, including located in Boston National Historic Park, and the replacing the original twelve diagonal braces, staff of the USS Constitution Museum and now laminated from white oak, each measuring Library also provided much information. Erik 34 feet long, 12 inches deep by 24 inches wide. A.R. Ronnberg Jr, undoubtedly the foremost These had disappeared during various rebuilds model-building maritime historian in the US, between 1820 and 1992. The initiatives reduced provided technical advice regarding the the fourteen-inch hog in her keel to less than two drawings and plans. Aimed at the advanced inches, proving Humphreys design, and model-builder, the plans, book, and (if needed) structurally restoring her to her 1797 condition. kit provide the material and step-by-step The plate on page 60 shows the diagonal riders, instructions to model the ship to her 1812 to using broken lines to do so; another drawing on 1815 configuration. page 75 also shows them. While the drawings and photographs in The photographs and drawings are well Marquardt's book would be a useful reference to produced. Unfortunately, twelve plates cross the a model builder or ship buff, I would suggest gutter, making them virtually useless. While the looking elsewhere for historical documentation. dust jacket states that the book is "Complete with a 1/150 Scale Fold-out Plan," there are no Roger Cole foldout plans as is normally understood; plans Toronto, Ontario are, however, reproduced on the back of the dust jacket; a poor substitute at best. If two-page foldouts can't be provided, the drawings on Faye Kert. Trimming Yankee Sails: Pirates and either side of the gutters should have generous Privateers of New Brunswick. Fredericton, NB: overlaps to allow copying and re-aligning the Goose Lane Editions, www.gooselane.com, sections accurately. 2005. 105 pp., illustrations, maps, photographs, While Marquardt is an internationally glossary, select bibliography, index. C$14.95, acclaimed draughtsman, it appears, at least from US $12.95, paper; ISBN 0-86492-442-9. the sources and acknowledgements (128), that the drawings used in the book probably came This slim little paperback is the sixth volume in from the USS Constitution Engineering the "New Brunswick Heritage Series," published Drawings Compact Disc, Naval Historical by Goose Lane Editions and the Military and Center Detachment, Boston, as the author thanks Strategic Studies Program at the University of "those individuals and institutions that helped New Brunswick, with the cooperation of the 72 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

Canadian War Museum, and the first in the Europe. Imperial authorities wanted the flow of series to examine a nautical subject. Readers will American goods into New Brunswick to quickly discover that the title is a bit misleading, continue. The merchants of that colony, in turn, for in fact New Brunswickers had few needed New England as a convenient outlet for opportunities - and often little desire - to "trim New Brunswick lumber and fish. Even after Yankee sails." After all, New Brunswick did not colonial authorities began to issue letters of yet exist during the war for American marque, few of the merchants of Saint John were independence, and as author Faye Kert explains enthusiastic about engaging in hostilities with here, New Brunswick was forbidden the right to their neighbours. Instead, letters of marque were issue letters of marque for much of the War of used to disguise a vigorous but now thoroughly 1812, so that the few merchants of that colony illicit trade between New Brunswick and who wished to invest in privateering had to do adjacent American states. It was to put an end to so through Nova Scotia. The only other war in this that the authorities finally withdrew which letters of marque were issued would be permission for New Brunswick to issue letters of the American Civil War, and by then, England marque. As a result, much of Chapter 2, on and her empire had signed the Treaty of Paris activities in 1813 and 1814, is devoted to re• (1856) which outlawed privateering, so that only telling the stories of several privateers owned by the United States of America and the New Brunswick merchants but with bonds Confederate States of America engaged in the posted by Nova Scotia merchants. practice. As a result, there is very little material While Kert is able to provide a basic on "pirates and privateers of New Brunswick" social, economic and political context for these that Kert can analyse, and though she is arguably developments, it is a shame that more details the foremost authority on the subject of British could not be given about the size, nature, and American privateering during the War of 1812 - characteristics of the commercial community of she is the author of Prize and Prejudice: Saint John that invested in privateering. Carl Privateering and Naval Prize in Atlantic Canada Swanson and David Starkey have both shown in the War of 1812 (St. John's, 1997) - she that privateering was very much a profit-driven seems hard pressed to make a book out of New commercial enterprise, so that the history of Brunswick's limited experience with privateering in any given community or region privateering. The book has only three chapters really needs a thorough explication of the social (the two-page epilogue hardly seems to count): and commercial context for its true significance two chapters on the War of 1812 and one on the and impact to be understood. Some of this is Chesapeake affair of 1863. While the series may suggested by Kert, but one is left hungry for have demanded a short book, it is difficult to more. avoid the conclusion that a longer one might not A very different story unfolds in the have been possible, for in truth there were very third chapter. Here Kert recounts the 1863 few "New Brunswick privateers." hijacking by Confederate sympathizers of the The reasons for this have much to do Chesapeake, a commercial steamer that ran with the cultural and social characteristics at the between New York City and Portland, Maine. time of the British American Atlantic colonies The plan was to outfit and operate the vessel as generally and of New Brunswick in particular. a privateer against Northern shipping. Kert Although war was declared in June 1812, Great includes the story here because some of the Britain did not formally authorize privateering ringleaders and participants were from New until October. This was out of recognition that Brunswick, and because the vessel put into New New England by then had developed into an Brunswick briefly following its capture. The important source of provisions, oats and hay for whole incident became something of an New Brunswick, which still lacked the embarrassing fiasco because so many laws were population or degree of economic development violated by the hijackers (who had quickly been to be agriculturally self-sufficient, as well as for captured) as well as by American and British the British military fighting the French in colonial authorities. Eventually the hijackers Book Reviews 73

were released, in part out of sympathy for the the general public rather than the specialist, but Southern cause, in part because the incident the more academic readers will not be unhappy threatened to inflame Anglo-American relations with the final result. There are unobtrusive that were still tender because of the infamous footnotes, usually pointing to the 31-volume Trent affair in 1861, not to mention the activities Official Records of the Union and Confederate of British-built Southern commerce raiders like Navies in the War of the Rebellion, and the well- CSS Alabama. Nothing of significance was written text doesn't oversimplify nautical or achieved by the plot, though several individuals military matters. The focus of the book is Greer, on the British American side later rose to and his letters home, and what they tell us about prominence in Canadian politics and law. life in the Monitor and the Union Navy. This is Overall, then, Trimming Yankee Sails not, strictly speaking, a ship's history since promises more than it can deliver. General Monitor occasionally recedes into the readers will be entertained by the colourful background, although she never leaves the stage. anecdotes described therein, while more Frequently, small details like her being painted discerning readers may gain some insight into a "light lead" colour in August 1862 can the nature and limitations of New Brunswick sometimes be teased out. privateering as well as the nature of that This reviewer is familiar with the colony's relationship with its American broad outlines ofthe American Civil War, and neighbours. Those wanting a more detailed and generally conversant with the naval technology thorough treatment of the motives, expectations, of the day - an "educated layman," of sorts. and procedures that lay behind colonial Other than the action at Hampton Roads, I've privateering should turn to Prize and Prejudice. not read much about the rest of Monitor's career. I didn't know that she spent so much time Olaf Uwe Janzen actually out on campaign, albeit usually lying at Corner Brook, Newfoundland anchor in one backwater or another. The editor has interwoven lots of useful background information about the land actions being assisted William Marvel, ed. The Monitor Chronicles - by the Navy, so the reader is always able to One Sailor's Account - Today's Campaign to understand why things were going on as they Recover the Civil War Wreck. (The Mariner's did. Just like her First and Second World War Museum). New York: Simon & Schuster, namesakes, Monitor's real war was in support of www.simonsavs.com. 2000. 272 pp., land operations. Indeed, the fight against the photographs, bibliography, index. US $35.00, CSS Virginia is given a surprisingly small cloth; ISBN 0-684-86997-7. amount of space in the book, which considering how often the battle is recounted, is probably not The Mariner's Museum, of Newport News, a bad thing at all. Virginia, is the custodian and home of artifacts The illustrations for the book have recovered from the USS Monitor, and has an been well chosen, and are a good mix of people, extensive archival collection of documents events, artifacts and Monitor herself. One relating to the career of the ship. From one of quibble is that each chapter is fronted with a these holdings comes the core of 77ze Monitor full-page photograph of one of Greer's letters, Chronicles—the letters of George Greer, who artistically, but not clearly, focussed. It does served in Monitor from her first commissioning look nice, but some of that space would have through her foundering on New Year's Eve, been better used by reproducing the period 1862. The book's publication coincided with illustrations at a much larger size - those important survey work on the wreck during the coloured lithographs deserve better, and the summer of 2000, leading to the recovery of her blueprints of Monitor (14-15) are absolutely engine in 2001 and its conservation by the tiny! It would seem that the book's graphics Mariner's Museum. designers did not have the readers' interests at The target audience for Chronicles is heart, but were much more concerned with 74 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

superficial appearances. McKinney trekked through the straits, sounds Textually, the book can be repetitious and passages of the vast inland sea mapped by in places. Big chunks of the letters show up as Vancouver in 1792. He recorded his thoughts sidebars, and make fascinating reading. But too and experiences, and kept a log that became a frequently, paragraphs from those letters show book, Sailing With Vancouver. up again in the text itself (124,126). That space It's part history and part sea story, could have been put to better use had the editor sometimes both at once. The combination seems expanded on some tantalising tidbits: the like a description of McKinney himself, a "submarine Alligator," for example (105). portrait of the artist as a septuagenarian. These are small complaints, however, Professionally, McKinney is an historian and a and overall the book is a fine addition to former research associate at the Vancouver anyone's library. Not only are George Greer's Maritime Museum. For recreational, he's a letters colourful - "Gluttonous Hogg" is how he manner, a self-described "modern sea dog," who describes one of his captains (115) - but the drinks rum for breakfast, and smokes a pipe faithful transcription of the original spelling and before the setting of the sun. Unfortunately, he grammar is more than just charming. The fact says so little about himself that one is left with that there are several uses of "leftenant," by the impression of an old duffer, a Don Quixote someone as proud of his native-born American at sea. In truth, McKinney has traveled status as Greer, hints that the Commonwealth thousands of miles by ship and boat - by river, pronunciation of "lieutenant" may have been lake and ocean - writing books about his quite common in the USN until a surprisingly unconventional voyages. late date. Through these letters, Chronicles As a sea story, Sailing With Vancouver opens a window into the life of the Civil War starts like a trusty old outboard: it only needs a lower deck, and highlights such matters as the few good pulls to get it going. The first is importance of having political influence, even to encouraging. McKinney is riding the huge swells reach the lowly rank of third assistant engineer. off Cape Flattery, heading in from the Pacific in In short, although not perfect, this is a the company of phantom ships, Vancouver's book which is an informative and enjoyable Discovery and Chatham. But this soon sputters read, a substantial souvenir for the Museum's into a history of European explorations of the visitors. western coast, a short biography of Vancouver, and a lengthy explanation of how McKinney William Schleihauf came to be out at sea that day. Another pull, and Pierrefonds, Québec McKinney is dogging Vancouver's ghost up the watery roller coaster of the Strait of Juan de Fuca (known by today's yachtsmen as "Juan de Sam McKinney. Sailing with Vancouver. A Paca" for its stiff breezes and currents and modern sea dog, antique charts and a voyage chop), scared by the winds and high seas, through time. Victoria, B.C.: TouchWood musing on the discomforts of the men of Editions Ltd., www.heritagehouse.ca, 2004. xiii Chatham and Discovery. Again the story stalls, + 210 pp., maps, place names glossary, but soon begins to hum along nicely, a joy to bibliography. CDN $ 17.95, paper; ISBN 1- read. 894898-12-5. McKinney is an engaging writer, adept at describing both the things he can see and When he turned 70, Sam McKinney felt a need those he can only imagine. He uses the journals for adventure. So he bought a boat from a man and jottings of Vancouver and his companions to who was selling one because he was turning 70, great effect, combining well-chosen passages and set out to follow the trail of Captain with his own observations to peel away time and Vancouver, a ghostly wake on the waters of make the reader a shipmate of Captain Washington State and southern BC. Through a Vancouver. He cruises up the mainland coast to spring and a summer, in a 25-foot sailboat, see for himself how Vancouver failed to notice Book Reviews 75 the great Fraser River flowing into the Strait of where Vancouver turned toward the open sea - Georgia. He follows the explorers as they trek and Hawaii - to conclude his west-coast up one long inlet after another, often wearily but explorations of 1792. Vancouver would return occasionally in high excitement, in the unlikely the next year, continuing north from there with chance that this one, or the next one, might Chatham and Discovery. He would complain prove to be the fabled Northwest Passage that bitterly of weather and geography; he would Vancouver was tasked to either discover or bury a sailor in one of the most desolate places disprove. on earth. And I badly wanted to follow along The book is at its best when McKinney with him and McKinney through that lonely and lives up to his promise of "sailing with beautiful land. If McKinney ever picks up his Vancouver," when he's sharing an anchorage quarry again, and continues to the north, I'll be with Discovery, or travelling in company, but the first to buy his book. two hundred years later, with the ships' boats that did the bulk of exploring and charting. Iain Lawrence "I followed the boats down Hood Gabriola Island, British Columbia Canal and it was largely as Vancouver described it: depressing. I thought its waters flat and lifeless and the shoreline marred by the tacky Thaddeus D. Novak, P.J. Capelotti (ed.) Life and houses and small communities that straddled the Death on the Greenland Patrol, 1942, highway running along the west shore of the Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, canal. And "hideous monsters" (imagined here www.upf.com, 2005. xx + 205 pp., illustrations, by Vancouver's sailors) do exist in Hood Canal maps, appendix, notes, references, index. US in the form of the long, grey submarines docked $59.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8130-2912-0 at the Bangor naval base, each boat equipped with enough atomic bombs to destroy most of Every sailor who has endured cold, seasickness, the world" (52). exhaustion, who has lived in close proximity to But McKinney strays often from the messmates as often as not tolerated rather than wake of Discovery, towing the reader like a liked, especially when extreme discomfort and dinghy on its leash through places and times that danger prevail, who has dreamed when being Vancouver never saw. Readers unfamiliar with soaked to the skin of remembered favourite the area might well appreciate his wanderings foods and delicacies that are only available on through the abandoned leper colony of the Darcy return to home port, who have missed their Islands, a modern-day Nanaimo, or an old loved ones, who have had occasion to doubt Mayne-Island hotel demolished fifty years ago. their own seamanlike qualities, and have at times But this sort of material feels incidental here. resented as well as admired the authority of both Perhaps McKinney wasn't confident that the good and bad officers and senior hands, will idea of "sailing with Vancouver" would provide identify with Thaddeus Nowakoski, "ski" to his enough material to fill a book. Or perhaps he shipmates, Ted Novak to the world at large. took on a task too great to be told in just two This diary, published in the series hundred pages. His histories of things other than "New Perspectives on Maritime History and Vancouver's expedition, though always Nautical Archaeology," (James Bradford and entertaining, are brief and scattered, like a Gene A. Smith, editors), is a classic of its kind. shotgun siege on history. It is hard to disagree with the publisher's Accompanying the text is a series of statement that "Novak's account will be of maps. But they don't do justice to the story. A significant value to students of the US Coast reproduction of Vancouver's original chart is Guard and of naval service in wartime" and that shrunken to an unusable size. The four modern "his illumination of the small details of a sailor's maps are frustratingly short on place names. life and perceptive observation of the arctic In the end, I was disappointed that region and its little-known people will appeal to McKinney gave up his chase at Cape Caution, anyone interested in maritime history" (4). 76 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

Ted Nowakoski had been laid off by use for rank and little or no knowledge of Coast the Chrysler Motors Dodge main plant in Guard protocol or regulations. Detroit, where he was a labourer, when he Nanok provided escort and supplies, decided in 1941 to join the Coast Guard, rather and performed other vital services for the air and than being conscripted under the Selective weather stations in Greenland. Novak served in Training and Service Act passed in 1940. The the vessel from June to December 1942, second youngest of twelve children, his elder performing every kind of duty, from keeping brother was a veteran of the First World War. watches to chipping paint, often in the most "Seeing him, I often wondered if one day I extreme weather conditions and at risk to life would become a blood-and-guts, mud-spattered and limb. Discharged from the Coast Guard Yankee doodle, dog-faced yard bird in the same owing to a back injury, quite possibly the direct trenches of France's Argonne Forest where the result of this service, he appears not to have Germans mustard-gassed Ben while trying, returned to sea, but his six months in Nanok had fortunately without success, to shoot holes in given him enough experience, and suspense, to him"(4). During the course of the Second World fill a lifetime. War, two other brothers joined the US Navy and The US Coast Guard has a reputation a third became "an army yard bird." They all for hard service. (Once when taking a Canadian survived, he recounts, although all became frigate into a New England harbour, with casualties. instructions to berth at a jetty where the chart A strapping young man twenty-one showed insufficient draft, we hailed a coast years old, six foot two and 176 pounds, Novak guard vessel with our problem and received the evidently went through his early training with reply "we thought they only asked the Coast flying colours because he was hand-picked in Guard to do that.") Novak has certainly June 1942, as a seaman first class, to serve in reinforced that impression. His reminiscences one of the ten wooden fishing trawlers that reveal the lengths to which Coast Guard sailors Commander, later Rear Admiral Edward H. went to prove their mettle. On one occasion, "Iceberg" Smith located and commandeered, in Nanok's tow line to a scow containing order to remedy a desperate shortage of escort irreplaceable scientific equipment parted, and vessels for the Greenland Patrol. The Nanok the efforts to recover the tow in heavy seas and (Novak speculates the name is a corruption of a howling storm beggar the imagination. After "Nanook"), 120 feet overall in length, 24 Vx foot capsizing the dory in the first attempt, in which beam and 12 foot draft, had a crew of twenty- Novak was lucky to escape with his life, three one men and two commissioned officers. We other volunteers leapt from the deck on to the become familiar especially with the chief, scow. "Wind tears away Talledo's sou'wester George Talledo (mostly American Indian), the hat. It shreds his foul weather jacket, and then cook, Russell Clark, several other messmates, his rubber trousers tear off and fly away! Clark and the captain, Lieutenant (JG) Magnus C. and Connors fare the same. In semi-darkness, Magnusson, the erstwhile Danish consul in the scow and ship drift apart. The scow can no Boston. When the United States entered the war, longer be seen.... We watch the hawser and after "Iceberg" Smith evidently persuaded Magnusson an eternity its limp form springs to life and to join the US Coast Guard. Two other stretches taut!.... We still don't know the fate of personalities, the first unlikeable, as well as the three men on the scow." When dawn broke incompetent, executive officer - "Where did this the next day and the storm had abated the three asshole come from?," writes Novak - and his men emerged safely from the cabin on the scow. replacement, had a lasting impact on Novak's "Cookie" Clark tumbles out, stiff-legged. He life on board. Discipline and routine, puts a fist into each armpit, flaps his elbows up customarily more informal than in large vessels, and down as wings. He loudly crows "cock-a- was particularly idiosyncratic in Nanok because doodle doo" like a rooster...Skipper pretends Magnusson, an old sea dog from Iceland with anger and disgust. Even though he cusses apparently thirty years of sea experience, had no Clark's nonsense, he is obviously relieved of Book Reviews 77 great tension and concern" (94-5). day find its way into print. Problems encountered and solved in Greenland inured the crew to hardship, and W.A.B. Douglas turned them into an impressive team, superbly Ottawa, Ontario held together by "Maggie" Magnusson. The return passage to Boston in December demanded all their skill and endurance. A storm that struck Adam Nicolson. Seize the Fire. Heroism, Duty and increased in fury along the west coast of and the Battle of Trafalgar. New York, NY: Newfoundland pushed them to their limit. HarperCollins, www.harpercollins.com. 2005. Another trawler sailing in company, the Natsek, 368 pp., illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. went down with all hands in the Strait of Belle CDN $36.95, cloth: ISBN 0-06-075361-7. Isle, presumably capsizing from the weight of ice on her superstructure. Novak, who remained 2005 was, unless you are absolutely dead to on the wheel for a straight seventeen hours at the matters nautical, which cannot include any height of the storm, describes the moment when readers of the Northern Mariner, the 200th Nanok, heavily laden with ice in spite of the Anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Not ceaseless efforts to chop it off, rolled over on surprisingly, there has consequently been a her starboard side until he lay under the wheel plethora of books and articles on the subject and pushing up at its spokes while the captain had of its deified hero, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson. one foot on the starboard bulkhead and one foot One may be forgiven for thinking that there is on the deck, pulling at another spoke of the surely little left undiscovered about either the wheel. Only extraordinary efforts in the engine man or the battle. Trafalgar is without doubt the room, which had flooded, allowed the vessel to quintessential naval battle, the one engagement survive this catastrophic situation. The end of that virtually everyone has heard about, even if their odyssey came a week later when Nanok only by name. Given its iconic status and the berthed at Constitution Wharf in Boston, a passage of two centuries, there really isn't much memorable episode described with splendid new to discover, albeit minor details do emerge élan. on a regular basis. What then justifies the Novak apparently had no idea that writing of yet another book on a subject that is keeping a diary in time of war was a court so well documented, interpreted and indeed, martial offence until Chief Talledo told him so, glorified? a week before their return to Boston. The crew Adam Nicolson, the son of Nigel had been told to hand in their cameras, but Nicolson, the publisher and author, and the nobody mentioned diaries! He wrote it up at odd grandson of diplomat Harold Nicolson and the moments in his bunk, not telling anyone in case ever-entertaining author Vita Sackville-West, he would be teased about it, and he admits to has produced a gem of a book that deserves to be editing the original with reference to ships' logs, on the shelf of everyone who wants to get a clear maps and charts before turning it over to the understanding of the battle and the brilliant Coast Guard historian's office in 1994. Since admiral who orchestrated one of the most then P.J. Capelotti, a reserve enlisted man crushing defeats of an enemy at sea in recorded attached to that office (and a lecturer at history. Trafalgar absolutely deserves its iconic Pennsylvania State University) has evidently status, and Nelson, if not his apotheosis, his gone over the manuscript and prepared it for reputation as one of the greatest admirals to ever publication. We owe a debt of gratitude to those serve his country and his profession. who have allowed us access to this unique What Nicolson has done with his personal memory, especially to the late Ted version of the battle is to explore the minds and Novak for putting it all down, and to George world view of its participants. This is an angle Talledo for not reporting his transgression It is that modern readers need to grapple with if they truly regrettable that the book is so expensive, are to understand Trafalgar beyond the and one hopes that a cheaper edition might one superficial level that, frankly, most of us have of 78 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord the battle and of Nelson himself. And, make no closing at less than half this speed. The crews of mistake, it is a world view that is quite alien to the ships had time to have both breakfast and ours, and yet with distinctly modern tinctures lunch while in full awareness of impending that are altogether familiar. If the past is a battle. The ponderous nature of the drama that foreign country, to paraphrase L.P. Hartley, it is was clearly in full process of development as the not wholly so and Nicolson has done a morning wore on, must have been excruciating tremendous service in bringing this world into a to endure. For those of us of today, intellectually sharp focus, greatly improving our conception of comfortable with a far more clinical and the both the battle and its significance and the supersonic type of warfare, it is debatable habits of mind of those who fought it - from all whether we could endure the strain. sides: British/English, French and Spanish. Nicolson is particularly strong in his The book is divided into two separate description of the approach of the two fleets, the parts. The first, entitled "Morning" devotes inevitability of the engagement, and the several chapters to exploring the backdrop to the apparently sure knowledge among the Spanish battle - not just the campaign per se, but also the and French fleets that they were very likely to be protagonists, the sailors, the officers, their crushed, and the technical aspects of the routines cultures and nationalities, and their ships. in the three fleets that made this so. One small Chapters are titled with suitably active adjectives example will have to suffice for many. The swell such as "Boldness" and "Zeal,"thereby was moving from the west, coming from behind providing a tone to the work that unifies the the British ships and toward those of the discussion - always very wide ranging - at hand. Combined Fleet. This made laying and firing the Nicolson's contribution is his discussion of the guns as their ships rolled difficult - not beyond intellectual climate of the period and hence, the that of well trained and experienced crews, but motivations ofthe participants and their state of certainly not something the French and Spanish mind. As well, he covers the engagement's sailors could achieve with any consistency at all. importance at the time and how this evolved as In fact, some crews in the Combined Fleet had the nineteenth century progressed. Indeed, the difficulty firing their guns more than once every sense of the "heroic" and "self-sacrifice" for five minutes, while the British could manage at one's country, of "duty" underpinned much of least three and sometimes five shots in the same the Zeitgeist of that century, only to be period. superseded by the carnage on the Western Front. Nelson's approach is often viewed by The gap between the perceptions of the battle casual observers as being the very antithesis of and warfare in general between the participants sound. Surely, most would argue, the key to and the public were as wide as ever, a gap naval fighting is to seek the weather gauge, and important in the development of the Victorian strive to cross the "T" of the opposing fleet. This world view. The first half of the book covers the classic manoeuver permits the full force of one's engagement from the time that the two fleets own fleet to inflict maximum damage on the glimpsed each other to that point at which the enemy's, while it is powerless to reply. Yet battle got underway. The second part, entitled Nelson was fully aware of what he was doing, "Battle" describes the battle itself. knew the weaknesses of his enemies, understood Naval engagements fought in the Age what the sea state (slow rolling swells) meant for of Sail were often extraordinarily bloody affairs, his ships, and indeed held the weather gauge. particularly in light of the heightened Vitally, Nelson also knew the value of sensitivities of the present day, and made the leadership and ensured that his flagship, HMS more chilling by the slow deliberate pace at Victory, along with HMS Royal Sovereign under which they unfolded. Modern readers are Collingwood, his second in command, led the intellectually aware that a ship-of-the-line two columns as they tore into the numerically moved through the water at speeds of up to ten superior Combined Fleet's ragged formation. knots, generally far less. At Trafalgar the wind Sure enough, the period during which conditions were such that the two fleets were his ships could not respond was trying but, Book Reviews 79 critically, not too trying. Once the poorly his old mentor until Locker's death in 1800, with managed ships and guns of his enemies came the letters serving as informal markers along under fire from his superbly trained crews and Nelson's road to fame. cleverly manoeuvred ships, the battle was Victor T. Sharman is a British virtually over. Nelson counted on the separation businessman with a consuming interest in the of the Combined Fleet's van by his two divisions Nelsonian navy. The book was published in to effectively knock them out of the battle. Once association with the Nelson Society, of which Nelson had 'set the table', there was nothing the author is a former chairperson. He was also more for him to do, and events unfolded as a member of the committee of the National expected - his death at his moment of triumph Maritime Museum organizing the was almost too poetic. The crushing defeat commemoration of the 200th anniversary of endured by France (the Spanish were stoic, if Trafalgar. scarcely enthusiastic, participants in the venture) The book had its genesis in a letter of ended Napoleon's ability to defeat Great Britain February 2nd 1799, (page xi of the preface), in and, in the event, his dream of European unity which Nelson seems to attribute his success to under the joys of French hegemony (that dream lessons learned from his one-time commanding was left to later generations, but I digress). officer. "I have been your scholar; it is you who The book is graced with excellent maps taught me to board a Frenchman by your and illustrations. The diagrams of the battle are conduct in the Experiment, it is you who always particularly good in this reviewer's estimation as told me 'Lay a Frenchman close and you will it provides a larger scale view of the battle and beat him'" Struck by this comment, Sharman felt situates it geographically and tactically far more the need for a biography of this hitherto little- clearly than is typical. The selection of paintings known personality. includes those that are now iconic as well as Locker came to the notice of Edward others, but includes sharp comments that are Hawke and John Jervis during the Seven Year's characteristic of the author's approach. War, when as a lieutenant in the frigate I unhesitatingly recommend this book. Experiment, he led a boarding party that It is an important and worthy addition to any captured the Telemarque against heavy odds. His library, and is essential reading for scholars of later career was not particularly distinguished, the period. Nicolson has accomplished the although quite typical of the vast majority of improbable with Seize the Fire: a fresh naval officers who performed perfectly well examination of a potentially tired subject that is throughout their service but never had an a genuine contribution to the literature of both opportunity for special distinction. The author the battle and Nelson. recounts Locker's story in considerable detail up until his departure from the Lowestoffe in 1780, Ian Yeates, establishing the picture of a consummate Regina, Saskatchewan professional and a truly good man. After that his uneventful life provides little material, and the author's focus shifts to Nelson. Victor T. Sharman. Nelson's Hero. The Story of The sub-title of the book is somewhat his 'Sea-Daddy' Captain William Locker. misleading in so far as it suggests a long period Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books of mentorship. Nelson served in the Lowestoffe Ltd., www.pen-and-sword.co.uk, 2005. xiv + for only about four months before Locker gave 210 pp., illustrations, appendices, bibliography, him command of an American prize, informally index. UK £ 19.99, cloth; ISBN 1-84415-266-9. renamed the Little Lucy, in which vessel Nelson operated semi-independently for the next eight William Locker was captain of the frigate HMS months. On Locker's recommendation, he was Lowestoffe, the first ship in which Horatio then appointed to Admiral Sir Peter Parker's Nelson sailed as a lieutenant. The book is flagship to be positioned for fast promotion. organized around Nelson's correspondence with Arguably, it was that recommendation, rather 80 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

than any tactical advice, that constituted interesting new perspective The book is not (1) Locker's most important contribution to a new analysis of Lord Nelson's career; (2) an Nelson's success. introductory work on Nelson and the navy, or The earliest and most numerous letters (3) an exhaustive analysis of the Nelson-Locker were written in the West Indies in the mid- correspondence. But in this reviewer's opinion, 1780s. They illustrate in much greater detail than the author never intended it to be any of these most secondary works the typical naval gossip things. He set out to write an interesting account of the time, and the day-to-day concerns of the of a special relationship between a typical naval professional sailor. With Nelson's elevation to officer and his brilliant protégé, and in this he post captain and commodore the perspective has succeeded. The book might well stimulate changes. Again highly detailed, and often the casual reader to delve further into the composed very soon after the event, the fascinating subject of the Georgian navy. For correspondence deals with the decisions of readers of this journal, any value probably lies in British commanders and with actions against the the picture it paints of the ethos of the naval enemy. For students of Nelson and of the war in profession, as revealed in letters intended to be the Mediterranean from 1793 to 1797, this is the read only by a close professional friend. most valuable section of the book. A second major shift seems to coincide with Nelson's Bryan Elson achievement of flag rank. His letters become Dartmouth, Nova Scotia much less frequent, less detailed and less timely: the letter that sparked Sharman's interest was his first to Locker since before the Battle of the Nile Harold G. Simms. One Hundred Forty-one six months earlier. Wooden Ships, 1872 - 1922. Amos Pentz Master In addition to using standard archival Shipbuilder of Shelburne, Nova Scotia. material and secondary sources, the author has Published by the author, 2004. x + 331 pp., obtained background from one of Locker's photographs, maps, appendices, bibliography, direct descendants. The bibliography is quite footnotes, indices, US $38.00 plus postage, extensive but does not include some of the latest cloth; ISBN 0-9759498-0-2. (Available from the works. Citations refer to chapter endnotes and author, HG Simms, P. O. Box 204, Norwell, for the most part are excellent, with the notable MA., 02061, USA. E-mail: [email protected]) exception that most letters are not referenced to their sources. They all come from one of three There is a caveat surrounding most self- works listed in the bibliography, but it is usually published books - they are perhaps unworthy of not possible to identify which one. When a letter a commercial publisher's interest and is reproduced in its entirety this may not matter investment. I do not know whether the author of much, but when only an excerpt is included, a this book chose to publish it himself or failed to reader seeking more detail would have difficulty find a suitable publisher, but to me there is no locating the complete text. question of this book's suitability. This Sharman has not included the entire handsome, large-format volume ably covers, in body of the Nelson to Locker correspondence. meticulous detail, the life and achievements of He does not discuss his rationale for choosing one of Nova Scotia's more eminent ship some letters as opposed to others, and after designer-builders. analysis, this reviewer could not discern any The book is divided into two sections. consistent pattern. The book's historical context The shorter first section is an introductory is merely sketched, and maps and plans are biography of Amos Pentz, starting from his totally absent. family's roots in Germany, through their Neither the letters nor the connecting emigration to Nova Scotia, and ending narrative reveal anything new about Nelson or appropriately, with his obituary. The second, his times, but building the story around his longer portion describes and outlines the correspondence with a single person adds an individual careers of each of the various ships Book Reviews 81 built by Pentz during his productive working century he designed and built the first two steam life. His shipbuilding career is divided into fishing vessels in the province, perhaps in specific chronological periods and each is Canada. That they were not a complete success prefaced by additional notes regarding Pentz' lies in their operation, not in their design and parallel personal life. construction. The Pentz family emigrated from the This catalogue of Pentz vessels is a Left Bank Palatinate (of the Rhine) in what is valuable source of information about this period now Bavaria, and landed in Halifax in 1751, to of wooden Nova Scotian vessels. The era settle in Lunenburg two years later. A century covered is the twilight of wooden sail and steam and three generations later, Amos was born in shipbuilding. Though none were very large, the 1849 in Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia, the son tern schooners built for the French, and those of seaman John Martin Pentz. At fifteen, Amos which ended up in the Portuguese White Fleet went to Shelburne to apprentice in a shipyard, had productive lives. Another tern spent a useful and continued at a Jordan Falls yard partially- career in South African waters. Simms opens a owned by his older half-brother. It was there, at window onto the working lives of these sail 21 years of age, he is credited with building the transports. One schooner was used to collect first of the one hundred and forty-one vessels, a tropical birds for Harvard University's Museum 100-ton brigantine, Qui Vivi. Several vessels of Comparative Zoology; another was the followed during his early married life in Jordan mother ship to an aerial survey of Labrador Falls before the family moved permanently to timber resources; quite a few found themselves Shelburne. in the rum running business. In fact, it seems Apart from some of the early Jordan that few spent their entire lives as fishermen or Falls vessels, Pentz never built in a shipyard cargo carriers. It is interesting to note the large bearing his own name. His career was spent percentage of vessels which were lost running working for other yard owners, including every ashore, suggesting that even during this Shelburne ship builder. In 1900, Joseph McGill relatively late period, navigational skills were offered him the job of building a schooner as the still wanting. yard's foreman builder was occupied with The most entertaining as well as another vessel. This was the start of Pentz's 22- informative aspects of the book cover the many year reign as master builder and foreman at stories which Simms has unearthed about the McGill's. Together Joseph McGill, the astute working lives of the people who managed and owner-manager, and Amos Pentz, the master- operated the vessels his grandfather built. It is builder, made the McGill shipyard Shelburne's also noteworthy that for a few years about 1910, (and possibly Nova Scotia's) pre-eminent ship many schooners were designed by Thomas F. builders for almost half a century. McManus, the Boston Naval Architect noted for At this point the author begins his his Indian Head and knockabout designs. written portraits of the Pentz fleet, frequently McGill's and other Shelburne yards built many augmented with good, though small, schooners to his designs, especially those photographs. Herein lies the principal value of destined for Newfoundland customers. this book, each vessel is followed from launch to The splitting of the indices into final disposition, presenting a cross- section of a General, Persons, Ships and Business is useful half century of Nova Scotia vessels with only and makes locating information a little easier. one thing in common - their birthplace. The The ships are listed chronologically through the length of these descriptions varies with the text and there is also an alphabetical list of the research data and life-spans of the vessels, some craft with basic specifications and name of which, like us, led more interesting lives than changes. Unfortunately, there are many irritating others. They were mostly schooners and many though minor errors, which might have been went into the fishery, but there is variety and eliminated by an editor. The author also seems Pentz was, at times, on the cutting edge of fascinated with footnotes with a couple on the design. For instance, at the beginning of the last pronunciation of words and others simply 82 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

covering terms and definitions included in the The administrative structure, demography and Glossary. It is abundantly clear that this society, economy, politics and the role of the advanced genealogical study came about after military and navy form the principal elements. long and extensive research in archives, Pritchard's main theme is that by 1730, newspaper morgues, registers and many other France had failed to establish an American sources over an extensive period of time. It is an empire. For him the principal enemy of empire affectionate introduction, examination and useful formation was not Dutch, Spanish or documentation of a shipbuilding ancestor well English/British rivalry, but the French deserving of such dedication. government itself. Without knowing his definition of empire, readers might be at a loss to David Walker understand his point. If, in 1730, in a London Halifax, Nova Scotia coffee house you asked any British sea officer or member of parliament if the French had yet established an American empire, his answer, I James Pritchard. In Search of Empire: The believe, would have been quite different from French in the Americas, 1670-1730 . the one Professor Pritchard provides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Though his enormous effort in www.cambridge.org, 2004. xxvii +484pp, researching and writing this book have been illustrations, maps, tables, footnotes, appendices, recognized in a well-deserved manner, I must bibliography, index. US$75.00, cloth; ISBN 0- query some of his statements. He asserts that 521-82742-6. "the overseas authority of the early French state of Louis XIV and his successors was not well- Awarded the Canadian Historical Association's developed, elaborate, or effective" (230). To one prestigious Ferguson prize in 2005, In Search of who has studied the simultaneously developing Empire is Professor Pritchard's third and most English/British colonial empire, this seems ambitious book. While his first two works on curious, as elsewhere he remarked that "French aspects of the French navy in the 1740s and colonies were state directed - indeed French 1750s were derived almost entirely from his own authorities were obsessed with regulation and research in French manuscripts, this book control..." (71). No French colony experienced depends greatly on the author's grasp of a rich the level of neglect by the Mother Country to and wide-ranging recent historiography. In many equal the "salutary neglect" characteristic of the ways, the book is a serious attempt to experience of the British mainland American demonstrate how far our understanding of colonies until the mid-1740s. We British empire French America and the West Indies has enthusiasts consider the seaborne empires of advanced since the shadow of his original France, Spain, and Portugal as examples of mentor, William Eccles, first appeared. Eccles "close" control by the metropolitan authorities. himself never cast his net as widely as Pritchard How else could the French state, for instance, has here, even with his France in America have prevented printing presses from being (1972). Perhaps this book is also a return to the established in the colonies? The British subject of Pritchard's PhD thesis, Ships, Men, government, by contrast, did not prevent and and Commerce: A Study of Maritime Activity in could not have prevented the publication of New France, 1701-1744. (University of some five thousand books and dozens of Toronto, 1971 ), but a subj ect he has transformed newspapers in colonial America before 1776. both by his years of teaching and the vast The author states that colonial expansion of the historiography. "populations were among the most free during The most useful aspect of this book is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (70). the inclusion of all of France's fourteen colonies How could this have been true, as the bulk of the in the Americas and Antilles. Those who lecture inhabitants were slaves? By the author's own to undergraduates in comparative European count, in 1730 Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and colonial history will find this particularly useful. Guadeloupe had an estimated population of Book Reviews 83

180,600, of whom 88 per cent were slaves. Did undertaken in future research. "free" apply only to"white settler populations"? Pritchard's most valuable contribution He correctly asserts in his chapter 'Settlements is the last section of his book, which describes and Societies' that the "population and social the impact on the colonies ofthe Franco-Dutch makeup of each colony was like nothing found Warof 1672-78, the Nine Years' War, 1688-97, in France," as all were "multiethnic and and the Wars of the Spanish Succession, multicultural" (72). 1702-13. All three began in Europe but had, on Pritchard's useful discussion of the occasion, a profound impression on the colonies. various colonial economies suggests that North Pritchard's detailed understanding of the American fur rescued "a dying European fluctuating naval and military implications ofthe industry" (123). Nothing that I have read, for wars is masterly. instance, in the work of Bernard Allaire If this book proves to be Professor (Pelleteries, manchons et chapeaux de castor. Pritchard's final major contribution to our Les fourrures nord-américaines à Paris, 1500- understanding of the early French seaborne 1632 (Paris: Presses de l'université de Paris- empire, it marks forty years of largely delightful Sorbonne, 1999, indicates that the long-standing and rewarding toil in the archives of the French industry of the furrier was declining in France. Republic. We thank and salute him, as he Indeed, the opening up of Russia to European focuses on new lines of historical inquiry. trade in the sixteenth century had already stimulated the industry before North American Julian Gwyn furs arrived in France in any great quantity. Berwick, Nova Scotia Throughout the chapter in which fur, along with tobacco, fish, and sugar are considered, almost nothing is said about the fluctuating volume of Brian Richardson. Longitude and Empire, How furs exported to France, the very reasons they Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World, were harvested. Rather, the focus is on tax Vancouver, BC; UBC Press, www.ubcpress.ca revenue raised in France by these imports. 2005. xvi +240 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, Curiously, the highly regulated French state bibliography, index. $ 85.00, cloth; ISBN0- apparently collected few trade statistics so that 7748-1189-7. Dr Pritchard is reduced to counting ship movements, without any idea - except perhaps It must be a daunting task to write yet another for slavers - what they were carrying and in what book on James Cook. There is probably no quantities. explorer about whom more has been written than When he informs us that with "little that eighteenth-century Englishman. The currency, capital, or credit, French colonists publications include biographies, books about remained prisoners of their metropolitan his voyages of exploration and the creditors, who held them in a remorseless grip" ethnographical collections he brought back, the (229), he forgets that credit was the sinew of drawings and paintings, navigation, cartography, trade. Any trader or merchant, French or astronomy, his discoveries in relation to otherwise, was simultaneously both debtor and contemporary explorers like Wallis and creditor. To be in debt was to be the recipient of Bougainville, and of course Cook's murder. One credit. If the metropolitan credit was "little," as wonders if it is reasonably possible to present he states, then colonial debt was likewise "little." new views on the voyages and the man who is Interest, the cost of debt, merely reflected the generally regarded as the greatest explorer in fluctuating price of money. If to have credit history. extended directly expanded business Before Cook's time, the Pacific was opportunities and wealth, which in turn would virtually unexplored: it was an empty space on raise the living standards of the debtors, the maps and charts. By the end of his third voyage, manner in which this may have affected the after his murder, there was little left to discover, French colonies is something that might well be and most of the credit goes to him. The jigsaw 84 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord puzzle ofthe earth's surface had almost been put a practical solution to find longitude at sea. The together: remaining terra incognita included the process toward such a solution was already Arctic regions, the Antarctic and the interiors of underway. It had started with the founding of the the continents that would all have to wait until Royal Society, and the Académie Royale de more peaceful times. Cook's voyages took place Science, followed by the establishment of the on the eve of a period of major changes and observatories in Greenwich and Paris, the great political and social turmoil. The American passing of the Longitude Act, and the invention and French Revolutions were followed by the of the octant. Improvements accelerated in the rise of the British Empire and its naval power, second half of the eighteenth century with the and international stability. Meanwhile, Cook's method of finding longitude through lunar voyages were not forgotten. They had made a distances (lunars), and the construction of lasting impact, not only by his accomplishments marine timekeepers. The accomplishment was but also by the work of those scholars who mainly shared between German, French and sailed with him. The question is: was their British scholars, scientific instrument makers, impact so powerful that people afterwards and seamen. The lunar method was primarily looked at the world anew, or were they an based on tables compiled by the Germans Tobias important element in an ever-changing world? In Mayer and Leonard Euler, and before Maskelyne Longitude and Empire, Brian Richardson, a it was used at sea successfully by the Frenchmen librarian at Windward Community College in Lacaille and Pringé. John Harrison received the Hawaii, has taken it upon himself to show how prize for longitude, but technically the work of Cook's voyages changed the world. Although he his French contemporaries Le Roy and Berthoud quite rightly approaches the issue from various was equally important. Their timekeepers were aspects, I have chosen to reflect on navigation successfully used in the Pacific by explorers like only. As the word Longitude in the title implies, Laperouse and D'Entrecasteaux, less than a it must be a crucial point in his argumentation. decade after Cook. These men too contributed to the changing of the world. When scholarship and In the first part of the book, Cook's technology came together in the 1760s, it was navigation is discussed and compared with that too late for Anson, but not for James Cook. He of Drake and Anson. Drake circumvented the succeeded in employing the methods of globe two centuries before Cook, when the longitude using lunars and a timekeeper. He was, knowledge of navigation and cartography was at in fact, the right man at the right time, and an infinitely lower level than in the 1760s. without this remarkable person, the Wishing us to believe that little had changed in modernization of navigation and cartography the intervening period, the author writes that might have taken longer. I agree with the author until Cook's time, ships still only "sailed down that Cook was more than an historical agent who the latitude," that is in east-west courses. This is discovered various places (172). not true. In 1500, Cabrai ventured into the Atlantic to find a favourable wind for the Longitude and Empire, however, does crossing to the Cape of Good Hope (and not place these developments in the wider unexpectedly reached Brazil). From the early context in which they occurred, but tries to seventeenth century onward, ships of the Dutch persuade the reader that progress was due to and English East India Companies navigated the Cook's voyages alone. Besides lacking a Atlantic and Indian Oceans toward the Cape, the somewhat broader view of what was going on in Arabian peninsular, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, navigation, the author is not always critical and beyond to China, sailing oblique courses, about his sources. The journal of Cook's first while profiting from prevailing winds and sea voyage soon became immensely popular, and it currents. It's true, they used established routes, is referred to abundantly in Longitude and something that could not be said of Anson's Empire. By order of the Admiralty, Dr John exploits when he sailed in South American Hawkesworth, a well-known journalist, edited it waters, in the 1740s. The problems Anson and was paid the handsome sum of £6000 of encountered dramatically underlined the need for which the explorer never saw a penny. But Book Reviews 85

above all, Cook was mortified by the result: it that Cook's voyages changed the world in the was not the book that he had written. It is way he has laid down in Longitude and Empire. therefore surprising that "the focus [of Longitude and Empire] will be to determine how the W.F.J. Môrzer Bruyns voyages, as printed text written in the first Bussum, Netherlands person, with Cook as the main character, imagine the world" (16). The fact that the two versions are sometimes compared does not Ricardo Perez. The State and Small-Scale clarify matters very much. Hawkesworth soon Fisheries in Puerto Rico. Gainesville, FLA: died, but Alexander Dalrymple, the cartographer University Press of Florida, www.upf.com, of the East India Company, did not. He remained 2005. xix + 218 pp., maps, figures, tables, Cook's adversary, accusing him of not having photographs, notes, bibliography, index. US put enough effort in looking for the Great $59.95, 0-8130-2901-5. Southern Continent. Rather than drawing this to the reader's attention, the author somewhat It is difficult to place this book, a reworking of glorifies Cook as "the voice of Enlightenment Dr Pérez' dissertation. The author states his exploration" (12), and as "a geographical argument as being that government retarded Linnaeus" (101). fisheries development in Puerto Rico by limiting Unfortunately, the book includes a opportunities for capital accumulation in fishing number of errors. The crew facing bitter cold "in communities. That thread certainly runs through their cabins" (51) is an anachronism. It would the work, but it is both less and more than that: take over another century before members of Pérez' thesis is not proven, yet it does not ship's crews got anywhere near to having cabins; encompass more than a fraction of the ideas on his first voyage even Captain Cook shared presented. If it is thus hard to say what this book (with Joseph Banks). The explanation of how is, it is easy to say what it is not. For Canadian latitude is found at sea (32) is unsatisfactory, and readers, a study of the social anthropology of not fitting Cook's standard of navigation. The communities engaged in the marginal fisheries sentence "Calculating the current time was of the Caribbean region would be of great value relatively easy, assuming that the sky could be as a contrast to the well-documented, larger- clearly seen"'(34,1 have not lifted this out of a scale but still small-boat fisheries of context), sounds like witchcraft. On the same Newfoundland. This is not such a study. Rather, page it is explained that the lunar method did not it is firmly anchored in a Puerto Rican context, depend on knowing the time on the prime even though that required the author to add an meridian. It most certainly did, albeit not by a apologia for its focus on a group, commercial timekeeper, but through times on the prime fishermen, comprising much less than one tenth meridian that were predicted by astronomers, of one percent of the island's population. and printed in lunar tables. Puerto Rico, like most other Caribbean In the end, it must be asked what role islands, has only limited fishery resources and Cook's navigation played in the forming of the even more limited development of a fishing British Empire? It was significant indeed, even industry. Into the mid-twentieth century, near- though numerous Pacific archipelagos were to shore fishing supplied but could not satisfy local become French colonies. But as a hydrographer, demand, while there was much inefficiency and Cook was surpassed within two decades by the wastage of the catch through lack of appropriate Frenchman C-F Beautemps-Beaupré, and the technology and infrastructure. From the 1930s, man whose talents in organizing the British the Puerto Rican and American federal Hydrographie Department eventually governments undertook the usual range of contributed substantially toward the creation of programs intended to overcome obvious the empire, Francis Beaufort. problems and modernize the fisheries, with the The concept of this book is interesting, usual equivocal and often dismal results. There but the author has certainly not convinced me was concurrent industrial development on land, 86 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

following boom and bust cycles partly driven by There is an important story to be told government policies. That development had an of fisheries development and modernization in impact on the fisheries, expanding markets for the Caribbean basin. When someone is ready to seafood, providing alternative employment tell that tale, this book will provide one of the opportunities but also causing environmental valuable case studies. Most readers would be degradation. The interactions between, and well advised to wait for Dr Pérez' work to be inconsistencies of, these various development thus reassessed and placed in a broader context. policies were doubtless important in shaping the coastal communities, but it is less sure that they Trevor J. Kenchington were so overwhelmingly central as to justify Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia Perez' insistence on viewing those communities through the lens of inadequate governance. The author selected three adjacent Norman Polmar. The Naval Institute Guide to communities for study. One has developed a the Ships and Aircraft of the US Fleet small but prosperous fishery, primarily SCUBA (Eighteenth Edition). Annapolis, MD; US Naval diving for lobsters. The second has only some Institute Press, www.usni.org, 2005. x + 649 pp., desultory commercial fishing, mostly netting of photographs, illustrations, appendices, index. US finfish, while the third is inland, and its residents $76.46, paper; ISBN 1-59114-685-2. only fish at the borderline between recreational and subsistence activity. Sadly, Perez' sample of One navy stands head and shoulders above the interviewees was drawn neither randomly nor rest: every other fleet falls far behind the United systematically across those communities, nor did States Navy, not just in raw numbers but he distinguish the three in most of his analyses, especially the ability to project power, anywhere thus confounding their fundamental differences in the world. Since 1939, the "periodical" Ships with all other factors shaping the answers to his and Aircraft of the US Fleet has been an questions. His analysis of those answers, the sole important one-stop source of non-classified data. original information that this book provides, too This latest edition, the eighteenth (the previous often took the form of naive interpretations of version, the seventeenth, was published in 2001 ) simplistic numerical data, coloured by the is no exception. It could be described as a author's own preconceptions. Beyond the "handbook," except it's too large and heavy a numbers, it is clear that the author has great volume to fit comfortably in the hand. As you empathy for his subjects, but it is not so evident might expect, this book is chock full of valuable that he ever understood them. As a result, data. fascinating insights too often lie just beyond the The USN is continuing to shrink in reader's grasp. numbers of ships, and its personnel are being Moreover, the analytical results, and stretched operationally, while at the same time such brief descriptive comments on the being challenged by the "transformation" fishermen and their communities as Perez required by new technologies, the requirements provides, are scattered as small nuggets amidst of brown-water and expeditionary warfare, and an almost-impenetrable thicket of political/economic pressure at home. As the anthropological theory (seemingly designed to proverb has it, "may you live in interesting include citations of every paper the author had times," and Ships and Aircraft provides a read), discursive treatments of the tangled snapshot as of 2004/2005, a very challenging history of industrial development in Puerto Rico, period for the American Navy. and much else that is extraneous to any The bulk of the thirty-four chapters is discernable theme. The material actually devoted to hardware, especially ships, type by relevant to the book's title or its author's type, class by class. Yes, battleships are declared argument could, with advantage, have included, probably for the last time; Iowa and formed a brief and concise essay, distilled from Wisconsin are due to be struck off strength in the original dissertation format. 2007. The inclusion of the USS Constitution Book Reviews 87

(338) is a particularly nice touch. Besides the forces. Subsequent chapters deal with the organ• technical particulars for each class (typically ization of the navy itself, not neglecting the displacement, dimensions, propulsion, crew, Military Sealift Command and the US Marine armament, radars and fire control, etc), the Corps. Concisely explained, this sort of origins of the class and often the source of the background material can be hard to find in one ships' names is included. Of particular value, spot, particularly when deadlines are pending. however, is the trenchant analysis included in Finally, six appendices summarize each chapter: both with regard to the warship naval force levels from 1945 onwards; the type as well as for most of the individual classes. various ship-building programs; transfers of An excellent example is the few paragraphs ships to foreign powers between 2000 and 2005; devoted to the cancelled "Land Attack those naval and coast guard vessels preserved as Destroyer" (DD21) program, which has been museums; a brief history of the aborted "Arsenal superseded by today's DD(X) (133). Ships of the Ship" program; and an explanation of the US Coast Guard and National Oceanic and popular term "transformation." Atmospheric Administration are also included. The book is profusely illustrated Aircraft, fixed-wing and rotary, are throughout, with a nice mix of photographs that given the same treatment, including lists of clearly show identification features of some squadrons and the type of aircraft flown. The ships, while others are simply impressive shots growing importance of Unmanned Aerial of warships. For all it's undoubted value, Ships Vehicles (UAV) is shown by their thorough and Aircraft is restricted to a single nation: any coverage in chapter 29. Weapon systems: guns; analyst interested in the navies of the world will mines; missiles (including airborne); nuclear still need ready access to one of the standard weapons; and torpedoes are described. As with (and pricey!) references, such as Jane's Fighting most entries, various types not only have their Ships. That being said, anyone writing about the unclassified performance data listed, but often US Navy as it is today will want to consult this include such information as their cost. An book frequently. interesting example is the "no frills" anti-surface torpedo requested by then-Secretary of the Navy William Schleihauf John Lehman, $200,000 each as opposed to the Pointe des Cascades, Quebec $2.43 million dollar unit cost for the Mk 48 ADCAP (538). Electronics - electronic warfare sys• Portia Takakjian. Anatomy of the Ship, The 32- tems, radars, sonars, torpedo countermeasures, gun Frigate Essex. London, Conway Maritime and weapons control systems - are summarized Press, www.conwaymaritime.com, 2005. 128 in chapter 31. The explanation of the cryptic pp., photographs, tables, drawings, sources, joint electronics type designation (e.g. the bibliography. UK£ 25.00, cloth; ISBN 1-84486- AN/SPG-60 fire control radar) in Figure 31-1 is 013-2 (Available in the United States and very useful. No doubt page 540 will be much Canada from the US Naval Institute Press, photocopied! One quibble is that not all the www.isni.org, US $42.95.) various radar and other antennae described are illustrated, which will be source of frustration to The aim of the Anatomy of the Ship Series is to anyone trying to untangle the electronics suite provide the finest documentation of individual aboard a modern warship. ships and ship types ever published. The Even more useful than the details of drawings are accurate, visually exciting and ships and weapons will be the chapters covering totally comprehensive, offering ship buffs, the structure of the USN. Chapter 4, "Defense historians and model makers a novel insight into Organization," lays out, in a very understandable the technicalities of each type covered. way, the American Department of Defense, and This book is a reprint of the 1990 the myriad associated organizations, including version published by Conway Maritime Press. the unified combat commands and joint task The late Portia Takakjian was a book illustrator 88 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord and draughts-person for over twenty years, draughtsmanship, and confusing lines. including being the senior illustrator-draughts- Takakjian, following an exhaustive analysis, is person at Columbia University's Lamont cer-tain that the draught was, in fact, a working Observatory. While her model building started drawing used by Hackett to make changes as he as a hobby, she advanced to the professional worked out design and construction details. The level, with models in private, industrial, and author presents her analysis of the draught and museum collections. She was one of the few Hackett's methods clearly, logically, and individuals who taught model-building courses methodically. Not only did she create superb in a formal classroom environment. She drawings of the vessel, she built a model of it, mastered the extensive inventory of skills verifying her interpretation. This model was needed to take a framed ship model from featured in a monograph entitled 32-Gun Frigate research and draughting stages through to the Essex: Building a Plank-on-Frame Model. It completed model. was published in 1985 by Phoenix Publications, The format of the Essex book differs Inc. and contains many photographs and slightly from others in the series: starting with illustrations of the model. the acknowledgments and followed by the This edition of the Anatomy Series introduction section, containing design and con• suffers the oft-repeated complaint of pages struction details, including information on the where plates crossing the gutter are effectively various rebuilds during the ship's career. This is useless, and the plan on the back of the dust followed by segments on the colour scheme, jacket is a poor substitute for true foldout plates. flags, rigging and sails, her service history, a Two-page foldouts would be a distinct service to career summary, and sources used. (The author readers and model builders using these publi• apologizes for the fact that space constraints cations. Unfortunately, in this book, the printer limit the bibliography.) The excellent selection added a unique touch of his own to the eighteen of photographs occupies eight pages and in• plates crossing the gutter by mis-aligning many cludes photographs of models built before and vertically. While most are minor mis• after Takakjian's earlier work on Essex was alignments, one is a full three-sixteenths of an published. The drawings, superbly executed by inch out. This is downright shoddy reproduction. the author and highlighting her draughtsmanship While there are a few minor proof• skills, take the remaining 95 pages. What the reading errors, for example, on two drawings on publisher describes as "Complete with a 1/144 page 92 illustrating anchor stowage and handling Scale Fold-Out Plan" is printed on the back, or gear, the details are in many cases wrongly inside of the dust jacket. This is not what is identified. In addition, while some items are normally understood as a foldout; namely, two numbered, the corresponding description and pages with only one end secured at the gutter. number is missing in the legend. I suspect that USS Essex, designed by William this occurred when the information on Hackett, was launched in 1799. While rated at Takakjian's drawings was transferred to the 32 guns, she invariably mounted more. Her com• printing plates, but I don't really know. prehensive refit, completed in 1809 by Josiah This book is an example of what can be Fox, was recorded in detail by him. Later, the achieved when someone with all the requisite Peabody Museum of Salem released the Essex skills undertakes such a task. With the above Papers by Phillip Chadwick Foster Smith, along noted exceptions attributed to the publisher, the with drawings by the late William Avery Baker. book is recommended for advanced model Using these and other sources, including a builders, ship buffs and historians. Advanced contemporary watercolour painting in the Pea- scratch model builders, however, would need to body Museum, Takakjian undertook a detailed produce one-piece drawings from the plates that study and interpretation of William Hackett's cross the gutters to allow them to build a model. draught of Essex. This draught has long been a subject of controversy due to what many feel Roger Cole was its unpolished state, questionable Toronto, Ontario Book Reviews 89

ones who relied chiefly on coastal commerce Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh. Young Men during the first few decades of settlement (11). and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. Indeed, most men in colonial Salem spent a New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, considerable part of their lives employed on the xiii+336 pp., illustrations, tables, appendices, water; the ubiquitous maritime components of endnotes, index. US $35.00, cloth; ISBN 0-300- New England society meant that this coastal 10067-1. shipping, boating and fishing defined the life cycle of almost every man and boy who dwelled In Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in in this ocean-fronting society. Those left behind the Age of Sail, historian Daniel Vickers returns were similarly affected. Given the dangers that again to a theme he first explored in his 1994 accompanied a maritime career, men often paid work Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of for their choice of career with their lives. Rates Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630- of widowhood in Salem were roughly double 1850: why did individuals choose to go to sea that of surrounding agricultural communities. during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and Moreover, with men removed from home on nineteenth centuries in New England? But frequent seafaring expeditions, women assumed Vickers' work is more than just a collective a degree of economic independence unknown in biography of the seamen of Salem. Through other communities. exhaustive research and fluid writing, the author Vickers then traces the changes that is able to convey to the reader the ways in which marked maritime life in the eighteenth century. seafaring changed during this period, and what Where seafaring had once defined a goodly these changes meant to Salem (and by extension, portion of most men's lives, it was now the rest of maritime New England). Young Men becoming a transitional occupation that was no and the Sea, then, is as much a story of the longer the expected, nor accepted, norm. Young maritime industry in this region as it is a detailed men were still expected to spend time before the assessment of the motivations that drew mast, "but to remain a sailor into middle age, fishermen, naval officers, privateers and after any realistic hope of promotion had merchant seamen to their respective trades. vanished, was now seen as a mark of exceptional Vickers relies on demographic data to poverty and social dependence"(l 19). In recreate the world of a typical Salem mariner. addition, the maritime trades were becoming He is able to redress a growing reluctance on the increasingly difficult and dangerous. While part of many historians to rightfully seafaring had always been a dangerous acknowledge the central role that maritime occupation, "mariners in earlier times knew what affairs played in colonial New England. Indeed, they were getting themselves into; their while most associate Salem with the witchcraft nineteenth century counterparts frequently did hysteria of 1692, few recognize that sailors, not" (187). many of whom squared equally poorly with the The changing nature of American social norms of landed New England society as maritime commerce, from coastal runs in did witches, constituted the central cast of familiar waters to transoceanic commerce that characters in the long span of Salem's history girdled the globe, was probably most to blame (51). Salem, so often depicted as an agrarian for the changing nature of the maritime community, was in fact, among the most community. The result was predictable: as fewer maritime of all Atlantic Basin communities, and local sailors stayed with the trade, more maritime labour was, for many, a defining part immigrants took their place. Larger ships, that of their life. Rather than rushing precociously were more complex to handle, replaced coasting into the interior, early New Englanders stayed schooners, and masters came from a different close to the sea, recognizing the pivotal role that social class than the men they commanded. maritime connections would play in their infant Where masters had formerly been drawn from society. The earliest New Englanders, then "by the local community, and had frequently come necessity, had become maritime peoples," albeit up through the hawsepipe, they were now the 90 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord product of a middling gentry class, while the rest engaged readership. of Salem became increasingly economically diversified. Timothy G. Lynch The impact on maritime labour was Vallejo, California telling: earlier, masters had chosen their crews based on personal friendship or family connection; in that environment, an "inheritance Pieter van der Merwe, (ed.). Science and the of obligations" protected seamen, though it may French and British Navies, 1700 - 1850, have "cut against the grain of economic Greenwich, UK: National Maritime Museum, exigency" (129). Now, with crews unknown to www.nmm.ac.uk, 2003. vii + 160 pp., masters, seamen faced a harder lot. Freed from illustrations, endnotes, index. ISBN 0-948065- parochial obligations, masters were more 51-6. inclined to treat their crew harshly, and admiralty courts, unlike their terrestrial brethren, Conference proceedings can be a "hard sell." were unwilling to loosen the bonds that kept a They may be too broad ranging in subject or the master in control of his crew. Not surprisingly, papers too uneven in quality to justify their rates of desertion skyrocketed during this period. commonly high cost. Science and the French As seafaring became less localized and less and British Navies, 1700-1850, the proceedings predictable, older sailors from sundry parts of of the 8* Anglo-French Naval Historians' the world replaced the local boys who had Conference in 2001, jointly organized by the previously composed Salem's merchant marine. National Maritime Museum of Greenwich and These local boys, for their part, were the Service Historique de la Marine, is an increasingly drawn into other activities, as Salem attractive little volume that merits serious became an industrial town: "where white canvas attention. The contributors are almost evenly once billowed, black smoke now belched" (212). divided between France and Britain, and are for While maritime labour had once been the the most part historians well established and defining aspect of a Salem youth, it was now the respected in their fields. The work presented province of an increasingly marginalized class. here by the younger scholars suggests that they Young Men and the Sea: Yankee are well on their way to comparable seniority Seafarers in the Age of Sail is an important work and respect. that redirects the attention of scholars back to the The book opens with what was maritime dimensions of New England's history. presumably, the keynote address of the Moreover, Daniel Vickers is able, through conference by N.A.M. Rodger. With his exhaustive and compelling research, to show the hallmark characteristic of sweeping research (the changes that characterized maritime labour notes cite works in French and Dutch), Rodger during the first two and a half centuries of reviews the relationship of Enlightenment Salem's existence. One wonders how these scientific work and attitudes, first to the French changes manifested themselves in other parts of navy, and then to the British. It is a the Atlantic seaboard, and if patterns observed in comprehensive overview which aptly sets the Salem would be repeated in Philadelphia, stage for what follows. The French were more Charleston or other ports. A comparative rigorous in their separation of "pure" science analysis of such scope might also illustrate from practical work, and their naval officers, general trends within the Atlantic maritime more mindful of the social imperative of being economy that this localized study of Salem was gentlemen, were less likely to stray from unable to fully illuminate. Still, these are minor theoretical work. This survey is followed by a quibbles and Dan Vickers should be commended succession of neat, tightly written articles for an excellent demographic study that should closely focussed on specific topics. Together stimulate similar works on other parts of the they combine to make a very satisfying whole. Atlantic World. Young Men and the Sea The next two chapters each examine a deserves a wide audience and guarantees an national "feature" as near as possible to the Book Reviews 91 period defined by the conference dates. Gloria The next two papers examine Clifton, author of the invaluable Directory of important aspects on the Royal Navy during the British Scientific Instrument Makers, 1550 - French wars. First, Roger Morriss writes about 1851, discusses London mathematical "Practicality and Prejudice: the Blockade instrument makers. The different social Strategy and Naval Medicine during the French distinctions of Britain (instruments makers could Revolutionary War, 1793-1801." He corrects the become important members of the Royal imbalance of attention on the fight against Society), coupled with workplace regulations scurvy, pointing out the important contributions that on the one hand, did not confine them to one of senior naval officers, bureaucrats, and many guild and on the other, permitted masters to take ships' surgeons, while specifically downplaying on several apprentices simultaneously, gave the role of Physician of the Channel Fleet Britain a real advantage in the eighteenth century Thomas Trotter. Jonathon Coad, a vice president in both the development and production of of the Society for Nautical Research, writes sextants and other important navigational and about "New Ideas and New Materials: their surveying instruments. The French advantage Impact on the Royal Dockyards during the during the same period lay with their Dépôt des French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars." Cartes et plans de la Marine. Although France Pointing to the appointment of Brigadier- had one; the British office of the Hydrographer General Sir Samuel Bentham (brother of the of the Navy was not established until 1795. political philosopher Jeremy) as the Inspector- Pascal Geneste, an archivist and for three years General of Naval Works. Coad joins those who the director of the Archives Centrales de la argue that the RN was much more progressive in Marine at Vincennes, reviews the history of the its adoption of science and technology than those Dépôt from its establishment in 1720 to 1850. who repeat the canard about "Their Lordships' He shows how, "the Depot, from its humble bounden duty..." want to think. Bentham was beginnings as a simple store of technical responsible for introducing automation to the documents, became ... a true hydrographie dockyards to the fullest extent of existing manufactory, with an exclusive monopoly, a technology. This including machine production very rapid rhythm in the growth of its collections of blocks and the adoption of steam pumps for and total autonomy of production" (44-45). drydocks. Alain Morgat, curator of the The three final papers look at topics of Bibliothèque Centrale du Service Historique de the post-1815 period. Randolph Cock, a speaker la Marine, introduces the theme of exploration at the CNRS 2004 conference, examines the role with his look at the Lapérouse expedition, which of Hydrographer of the Navy Sir Francis was viewed from the very beginning as a Beaufort in supporting science alongside his continuation and completion of Cook's work. survey work. Ann Savours (who, like Roger Morgat enumerates the examples of the English Morriss and Nicholas Rodger, requires no influence as well as the similarities between the introduction) examines three less well-known Cook and Lapérouse, including the coincidence Antarctic voyages of John Biscoe, Henry Foster of their fates. This is followed by "Exploration and James Clark Ross in the 1830s and 40s. and Colonization in the Pacific: Three French Finally, Christian Borde, a senior lecturer at the Voyages under the Bourbon Restoration and the Université du Littoral-Côte-d'Opale de July Monarchy" by Hélène Biais, a senior Boulogne-sur-Mer examines why French lecturer at the Université de Champagne- governments at various levels have claimed that Ardennes. All three expeditions had strong Frédéric Sauvage invented the propellor, and commercial overtones, and resulted, ultimately, convincingly refutes them. in French claims to the Marquesas Islands and This collection makes a very useful Tahiti. They could be contrasted with the contribution to the history of science in these contemporary Untied States Exploring two navies and is easily recommended to all who Expedition, or the slightly later overland Palliser are working in the field. As the papers are all expedition in western Canada. about ten pages in length, it is a very readable 92 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord introduction to the field for those with a more around useful chapter sub-headings, his general interest. publisher had the wisdom to allow footnotes, and his many charts and tables help the reader to William Glover grasp the points at hand. One of most important Kingston, Ontario of these concerns the naval debt. Wilkinson shows how this debt was far from a problem; in fact, it was "the very engine that made [the Clive Wilkinson. The British Navy and the State Navy] work effectively" (64). It was also a vital in the I8'h Century. Rochester, NY; The Boydell tool of ministerial accountability. Creative Press, www.boydellandbrewer.com, in accountancy might help to rationalize the reason association with the National Maritime Museum, for an increase in naval debt, but the increase 2004. x + 246 pp., illustrations, footnotes, still had to be accounted for in Parliament. appendices, bibliography, index. US $90, cloth; Wilkinson mounts a convincing challenge to the ISBN 1-84383-042-6. traditional view of naval finance as inept and "medieval" (65). "What has become of the Navy or what has A detailed description of the system of become of the money granted for it?" demanded naval administration is followed by the Earl of Bristol in 1779 ( 165). Historians have chronologically-organized chapters that discuss often debated the Royal Navy's preparedness in the period from the end of the War of the the later eighteenth century. Scholars have Spanish Succession to the end of the American usually concentrated on personalities such as the War of Independence. The main themes here first lords of the Admiralty, whose policies have include the growing commercial demand for been variously praised or blamed. The role of naval protection, the dock and yard Lord Sandwich has been prominent in these infrastructure which limited the pace of new debates, with historians lining up for or against shipbuilding, expanding international and his responsibility for the neglect of the navy imperial naval commitments, and the varying before the American War of Independence. personal influence of successive first lords. Sandwich complained that he inherited a "paper Wilkinson also considers the problems posed by fleet" of technically extant but largely useless shipboard environment (especially on the health ships. Others accused Sandwich himself of of crews and the longevity of ships), the creating this problem. development of modern managerial systems in Clive Wilkinson sets these the navy's civil branch, and the mutually personalities in context through a vigorous reinforcing relationship between the navy and engagement with the primary sources of naval Parliament. All of this successfully reinforces administrative history. Too often, historians (like the book's main thesis: that sound management, first lords) relied on material compiled for (mostly) competent leadership, and an Parliamentary reports or other official inquiries. increasingly managerial Admiralty all helped to Wilkinson questions this methodology, pointing keep Britain ahead of its rivals in the later out that recent research on dockyard operations eighteenth century. has highlighted inaccuracies in contemporary The historiographical location of this reports. He pushes behind the official statistics book was its only puzzling quality. The work of and rhetoric to consider the operations and Daniel A. Baugh, especially his British Naval limitations of naval administration as a system. Administration in the Age ofWalpole (1965) is At the heart of his meticulously frequently cited, and Baugh himself wrote an researched argument is a careful examination of enthusiastic forward for the book. Wilkinson the process of financing and reporting which notes that his study was "intended more to created relationships between the Treasury, the complement" Baugh's work than to revise it Admiralty, and Parliament. One of Wilkinson's (36). Much has changed since the 1960s, greatest achievements in this analysis is clarity: however, in terms of how historians deal with his prose is lucid, his explanations are organized administrative systems. One does not have to Book Reviews 93

agree with Michel Foucault to understand that the British presence in the Pacific Ocean of the broader cultural contexts are crucial to exploratory age is demonstrated clearly, and the understanding both the shape and the power of particular value of this book is the exposure it systems. Wilkinson knows this at some level, as gives to the extent of British interest and activity when he reminds us that the Admiralty was part in the South Pacific before the great voyages of of "a broad and complex naval organization, Anson, Wallis, Byron and Cook; an activity little itself integrated into the machinery of known and understood by those who feel B ligh ' s government" (20). His bold venture into the Bounty was sailing into waters unknown to dynamics and minutiae of that machinery is Englishmen. As Williams reveals, that was far original, and his case for a less personality- from the case. In the beginning of the era driven analysis is compelling. What is missing, covered by the book, the Pacific was for all however, is an analysis of the system as such. intents and purposes a Spanish domain, if any After all that has happened in the structuralist European power could have been said to and post-structuralist historiography of dominate so vast a sea. It was the Mar del Sur, administrative systems, this silence is striking. and British incursions into Pacific waters were This is indeed a book which complements, rather largely those of sporadic piracy. It was the than revises, the work of previous generations. eighteenth century, that most momentous of epochs, that brought the disintegration of Jane Samson Spanish primacy in the South Sea, its Edmonton, Alberta termination marked by the Nootka Crisis and the passing of initiative in Pacific voyaging to Great Britain. Williams's various essays present an Glyndwr Williams. Buccaneers, Explorers and invaluable picture of how all this came to pass. Settlers. British Enterprise and Encounters in Before the dawn of the eighteenth the Pacific, 1670-1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate century, the commitment to exploration and Publishing Ltd., Variorum Collected Studies scientific inquiry for its own sake that would be Series, www. Ashgate.com, 2005. xii + 300 pp., demonstrated by Joseph Banks, the matured maps, illustrations, notes, index. US $109.00, Royal Society, and even the mentality of cloth; ISBN 9 780860 789673. enlightened seamen such as James Cook, was not important in English minds. If anything drew Glyndwr Williams is an extraordinary Welsh the subjects of the Stuarts, William and Mary, historian who has become renowned as the and Queen Anne into the impossibly remote leading scholar of Pacific exploration active South Seas, it was the lure of gold from the today. In this dense tome, his publishers have Spanish Empire and loot from its settlements. collected seventeen of Williams's papers on a Formalized and short-lived "companies" and the wide range of Pacific exploration topics and free-wheeling flotillas of outright pirates were assembled them in a compendium volume of the first English presences into the Pacific, scholarship as broad in its revelations of reappearing there more than a century after the Williams's knowledge as it is deep. That there is extraordinary voyage of Sir Francis Drake a strong thread of continuity and logic common around the world. The goal was fairly simple: to to all the articles is evident, but the physical secure some of the "wealth of the Indies" that presentation of the papers oddly retained the was flowing into Spain from its worldwide pagination and the fonts from their original empire. The struggle soon became a clash publications, giving the book a discomfiting air between the efforts of the Spanish to limit of stapled-together term papers quite at variance or exclude British trade with the Pacific world, with the quality of their content, and causing an and British attempts either to obtain legally eyebrow to raise at the extraordinarily high retail negotiated rights to conduct that trade or to carry cost of the book. out a mixture of illegal trade or outright plunder That Williams is the successor to J. C. without regard for legality. Beaglehole in his mastery and comprehension of In the event, the illegal penetrations of 94 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord the South Seas were by far the more successful, exposure of what lay in the Pacific to waiting and built a growing body of knowledge in European minds. In the latter part of the book, British seamen of the vagaries of Pacific Williams focuses not only on Cook's navigation. But, as Williams points out in one navigational and exploratory achievements, but paper, as long as the principal aim of British also on their impact and significance. He Pacific navigation was the securing of Spanish examines in detail the misgivings of Cook and of loot, British ships plied only the known routes of subsequent observers about the tragic impact of Spanish shipping or coasted the semi-settled European contact for the Pacific island Pacific side of America, looting its communities populations, and explores the philosophical and or trading with them as time, inclination and psychological impact of Cook's geographical chance provided. discoveries on European thinking. The spark that would ignite an interest Williams's final paper deals with the in plunging into the limitless expanses of the scientist who participated in James Cook's first Pacific simply to see what lay there would not be voyage, and rose to subsequent primacy in the struck until the cataclysm of the Seven Years' intellectual world of late Georgian Britain, War decided which European nation would be Joseph Banks. As the companion of Cook, paramount in North America. Britain's victory president of the Royal Society, and a personally left a humiliated France to consider the loss of wealthy naturalist with a keen sense of both its fledgling worldwide empire in Canada and scientific inquiry and patriotism, Joseph Banks India, and to reconsider the arguments, that had became the singularly most effective promoter been raised by French geographers for several of British investigation and expansion into the decades, that a potential new empire might lie in Pacific world revealed by Cook's explorations. the unexplored Pacific. Neither Britain nor Banks did so in a lifelong context of competition France had been ignorant of the vast Pacific with the French. By the time Wellington Basin's potential, and the British had undertaken defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and several half-hearted attempts to launch essentially put a bloody end to that centuries-old exploratory voyages. Of these, the most conflict, Banks had laid the foundation for a successful British Pacific voyage between 1700 British national expansion into the South Pacific. and 1750 was Commodore George Anson's Eventually, this led to the creation of Australia medically disastrous circumnavigation of 1740- and New Zealand, anchoring one vast corner of 1744. It was, however, a naval expedition intent the great canopy that was the British empire of not on exploration but on disrupting Spanish the nineteenth century. Williams's remarkable trade as part of the conduct of the War of 1739- line of thought from the plunders of seventeenth 1748, and it resulted in the death by scurvy of century pirates to the glimmerings of Empire at most of Anson's crewmen—thereby revealing a the beginning of the nineteenth is clear in this major inhibition to Pacific travel. valuable volume, deserving of a place on the bookshelf of Pacific scholars. The only regret is With the end of the Seven Years' War that the publisher presented the gold of in 1763, both Britain and France undertook, for Williams's thoughts in a cardboard box of the first time, expeditions into the Pacific shortcut book design. They deserve better. motivated as much by exploration, scientific inquiry and pure interest, as by a desire to seek new territories ripe for trade or conquest. Within Victor Suthren a decade of the Treaty of Paris, Byron, Wallis, Merrickville, Ontario and Cook had led formal expeditions into the uncharted Pacific, and the French had sent Bougainville. Notwithstanding the abilities of Gregory D. Young and Nate Braden. The Last Bougainville and his scientific team of embarked Sentry: The True Story that inspired the Hunt for observers, it would be the achievements and Red October. Annapolis, MD; US Naval observations of British navigator James Cook Institute Press, www.Navalinstitute.org. 2005. xi and his naturalists that would provide the widest + 250 pp., photographs, maps, appendices, Book Reviews 95 glossary of Russian terms, notes, bibliography, slogans. Sablin next joined the new anti• index. US $ 28.95, cloth; ISBN 1-59114-992-4. submarine destroyer Storozhevoy (Sentinel), of a class designated by NATO as Krivak I. As "I am convinced that a revolutionary political officer, he was primarily responsible for consciousness will catch fire among our people" inculcating ideology. His broader responsibilities - Soviet naval officer Valéry Sablin in his included maintaining morale. Storozhevoy's had farewell letter to his parents. The Last Sentry is a crew of 194— 15 officers, a leavening of 14 the extraordinary story of an idealistic Russian mostly young Mitchmaniy or Warrant Officers naval officer who seized control of his ship in and 164 conscripts in their late teens and early 1975 and planned to use it as a platform from twenties. which to single-handedly launch a popular During his twenty-seven months in the uprising. He aimed to purge the regime of ship, Sablin became convinced that he had a corruption and establish a genuinely democratic mission to act. Strong-minded, he gained a system, which he believed could still be based reputation for stubborn independence. The on Communism. authors quote his superior in the political officer The authors both have military pasts. chain:" He had a character all his own, with Greg Young was a US Navy aviator when he several idiosyncrasies. He liked to do things on first became interested in the story while doing his own terms" (80). His twice-weekly research for an academic thesis twenty-five indoctrination sessions gave him regular contact years ago. Nate Braden served in the US Marine with all ranks. It appears that Sablin was Corps as an intelligence officer. Their narrative genuinely interested in people and got to know is based on interviews with Valéry Sablin's most of the crew through one-on-one chats. widow, as well as Russian and western Meanwhile, he decided that he could somehow television films about the incident and published trigger a regime change by appealing to the Russian-language accounts. After six decades of Soviet people through the mass media. He had communism, Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union no network of like-minded dissatisfied citizens of the seventies had ossified into what the and did not share his plans in advance with his Russians termed the Stoya or stagnation. Young wife or parents. and Braden draw heavily on secondary sources Sablin eventually decided to act when when layering descriptions of the Soviet state Storozhevoy was about to go into refit. Four and its armed forces into their narrative to officers, including two key individuals, and provide context. At the end of the book they some of the crew were on leave. Sablin took a provide a potted history of the Cold War from single, 20-year old sailor who admired him into the US perspective after 1975. The best parts of his confidence. Locking the commanding officer the book by far are those which concentrate on up on a pretense while the ship was in Riga, Valéry Sablin and the actual mutiny. Sablin outlined his intentions to his fellow A third generation naval officer, officers and the warrant officers: they would Sabin's career had been a model one. He was a take the ship to Leningrad to launch his product of the prestigious Frunze naval academy revolution. Dissenters were given a chance to in Leningrad which preserved a degree of opt out and be confined. Only three (all junior) continuity with the tsarist institution whose of the eight other officers present supported premises it occupied. After nine years in the Sablin, and one of these quickly defected, fleet, culminating with time as Executive Officer escaping to raise the alarm. Five warrant officers of an escort, Sablin elected to specialize as a were in support and three opposed. Even though political officer and spent four years at the Sablin was the only individual with a weapon, it Military Political Academy in Moscow. Here he is telling that he was able to confine so many read voraciously through the standard writings dissidents without a struggle. One of the officers about Communism and concluded that the who opted out told a post-Soviet rehabilitation regime was perpetuating a self-serving system of hearing years later that he and the others hoped nepotism which did not reflect its inspiring that Sablin's plan would succeed. Valéry Sablin 96 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

next addressed the ship's company who about a mutiny: in the Soviet Navy? Impossible. supported him. Tom Clancy (then an insurance salesman) used Storozhevoy put to sea. Within hours, Greg Young's original thesis as the inspiration she had reached the Baltic but was surrounded for his best-selling Hunt for the Red October, by naval and border guard warships. Aircraft changing the premise to a planned defection appeared overhead. Sablin broadcast a manifesto rather than a political act. to the Soviet people, but because of his sketchy The Last Sentry is illustrated with planning, it never reached its intended audience. unique photographs provided by Sablin's It was impossibly lengthy, and was transmitted widow. Unfortunately, they are reproduced in a encoded because that is how his poorly briefed dull finish but the book has been bound in the young radioman had always cleared outgoing trademark US Naval Institute sturdy binding. traffic. Warships ignored orders to fire on Valuable annexes reproduce contemporary Storozhevoy. After repeated radio orders to stop, documents. The authors are occasionally the Soviet high command instructed aircraft to careless about details and thus do not clarify disable the ship. Strafing and bombs put the how Storozhevoy, described as making her rudder out of action and holed the hull. By now escape to the open Baltic at her maximum speed support from the crew was wavering; the of over thirty knots, was overtaken by slower dissidents were freed. Sablin and his young pursuers. There is confusion about how many collaborator were subsequently tried. Soviet men rode with Sabin on his fateful adventure: on justice prized confessions, even in closed trials. page 94 the figure given is 194— possibly the Valéry Sablin was interrogated for weeks and number on Storozhevoy's books— but page 163 mistreated. When his wife and son were says 162, probably the correct figure. These are eventually allowed a ten-minute visit in prison, quibbles. Overall, The Last Sentry is a he joked about wanting a dentist because his stimulating examination of Valéry Sablin's front teeth had been knocked out. Because of quixotic revolt. The narrative, in combination their strong sense of collective identity and with the annexes, provides insights into a bizarre tumultuous history, treason is a word with much incident and how the Soviet Navy functioned more powerful connotations for Russians than three decades ago. for the citizens of nations with a long liberal democratic tradition. Eventually confessing to Jan Drent treason, Sablin was executed and his Victoria British Columbia collaborator sentenced to eight years in prison. The Soviet military hierarchy was obviously shaken by the Storozhevoy incident. Bert Wyatt. The First Casualty. Weardale, Co. Crew members were personally questioned by Durham, UK; The Memoir Club, senior officers and then dispersed to other ships; www.thememoirclub.co.uk, 2005. xvi + 240 pp., their former ship was transferred to the Pacific photographs, illustrations, maps. with a new complement. The Swedes and others UK £ 12.95, paper; ISBN 1 -84104-131 -9. had intercepted radio traffic during the pursuit of Storozhevoy. Within days the Soviets set a Fishing has always been a hard life. Even today, battered target vessel adrift so that it would wash fishermen continue to be lost at sea with little into Swedish waters to provide a credible cover notice taken by anyone outside their community. story. Two weeks later, a freshly-painted Krivak In 1974, the deep sea trawler Gaul (Hull, UK) class destroyer bearing Storozhevoy's pennant disappeared, along with her entire crew. In The number ostentatiously cruised the western First Casualty, Bert Wyatt tells what is known Baltic. During a naval visit to Denmark the about the tragedy, and outlines suggestions as to following year, the Commander of the Baltic the cause of her loss. Fleet, who had been appointed when his In some respects, this is a curious and predecessor was sacked in the wake of the not entirely satisfactory book; no index, no seizure, indignantly shrugged off press questions footnotes, and no bibliography (though some Book Reviews 97

primary source documents are cited in the text). Running a few yards from the wreck was a large, The foreword is by Robert L. Tate - at first taut, cable, that some felt looked quite different glance, an unusual choice, in that he is a from the usual run of cables found onboard ship: Brigadier General, retired from the United States the American SOSUS (Sound Surveillance Air Force. As one reads the story, however, his System) was suspected. background and knowledge of NATO Additional surveys took place in 1998, intelligence gathering mechanisms makes his and then again in 2002. No divers went down contribution somewhat less surprising. Ever (the wreck is in some eight hundred feet of since she was lost, there have been suspicions water, deep but not out of the question), but that Gaul was on a mission for the Royal Navy, remotely operated cameras penetrated part way collecting intelligence on Soviet naval into the vessel. A new enquiry was held to operations. examine the new evidence, and revisit the old. The basic facts are straightforward. No doubt to the dismay of the conspiracy The factory freezer trawler Ranger Castor theorists, the new conclusions, although (1,106 GRT) was one of a group of four sister different from those in 1974, did not blame any ships, ordered in 1969 by the Ranger Fishing outside agency for the tragedy. Instead, the Company, and purchased by Hellyer Brothers (a report (the overview is quoted verbatim in the subsidiary of British United Trawlers) in 1972. book) determined that she had probably been Renamed Gaul, she departed Hull on 22 January running before the wind on a southerly course, 1974, with a crew of thirty-four, plus one and took water in through the open chutes in the stowaway. After a stop in Norway to exchange stern, that passed below onto the factory deck. mates, she proceeded to the fishing grounds off When the crew realized what was happening, the North Cape where she arrived on 29 January. and tried to bring the vessel into the wind, the Typically for that area and that season, the resulting surge of water below caused Gaul to weather was bad. A "moderate gale" was capsize. To this reviewer, based on what is blowing on 8 February, when Gaul made routine presented in the book, this is a very plausible, radio signals to several other trawlers in the indeed a convincing, explanation. Wyatt makes vicinity. Her last transmissions, private much of the fact that the Gaul is sitting upright messages from two of her crew, were sent at on the bottom, thinking that this contradicts the 11:00. She then disappeared. Lost with all hands capsizing theory: he does not seem to realize that - all too common a fate, for deepwater fishermen it is quite common for capsized vessels to right the world over. Wyatt notes the statistic that themselves as they sink. between 1940 and 1987, Hull lost one hundred The roughly two decades between and fifty-six trawlers and "several thousand" GauPs loss and the latest enquiry saw a certain fishermen (24). amount of government (including naval) dis• The resulting enquiry delivered it's interest, much of which has been recounted here. verdict on 11 October: Gaul foundered after Tedious reading, but important for anyone trying taking a series of heavy seas on her trawl deck to understand the entire episode. Rather more when she was broadside on, which caused her to interesting is the description of how the Royal capsize. Nevertheless, rumours continued to Navy made use of volunteers in the trawler fleet circulate, and some of the families of the crew to photograph any Soviet warships encountered, remained unsatisfied. Eventually, in 1997, an known as "Operation Hornbeam." Some people expedition was mounted to find the wreck (a believed that the Gaul had been intercepted by joint effort of the UK's Channel 4 and the the Soviets while performing such activities. Norwegian NRK). To no-one's surprise, the There are a handful of illustrations trawler was found - in less that five hours! - scattered through the book. Unfortunately, the some seventy miles north of North Cape. She photographs are very poorly reproduced, and was sitting almost upright, pointing into what several of the underwater shots nearly would have been the wind when she was lost, impossible to figure out. Overall, The First and appeared to be virtually undamaged. Casualty is worth looking at if you have an 98 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord

interest in the modern British deep sea fishing Japan's ability to wage modern war. This stark industry, or the Hull-based trawler fleet that possibility coloured Japanese planning, which once was. It may not be the final word on the came to include near suicidal aspects. The de• loss of the Gaul. gree to which the plans were intended to provide a suitably heroic final mission for Japan's William Schleihauf remaining warships is one of the more Pointe des Cascades, Quebec contentious aspects Willmott highlights when reviewing Japanese preparations for the battle. The final Japanese plans proved complex and H.P. Willmott. The Battle of Leyte Gulf. The disjointed, and the wonder is that they came so Last Fleet Action. Bloomington, IN: Indiana close to success in certain parts of the battle. University Press, www.iupress.indiana.edu. A key aspect of this battle is how much 2005. xii + 399 pp., photographs, maps, tables, it was part of a continuous and ongoing series of appendices, bibliography, index, US $35.00, operations that cannot be understood in isolation, cloth; ISBN 0-253-34528-6. a point Willmott is continually at pains to make. The dynamic and interactive nature of these The series of violent naval clashes around the operations is demonstrated by the impact of Philippines in late October 1944 have collec• USN carrier operations the week before the tively come to be known as the Battle of Leyte battle of Leyte Gulf. Operating against Formosa Gulf. Willmott, an acute if often caustic observer (Taiwan) and Okinawa, these major air attacks notes, however, that none of the action actually provoked a significant Japanese response. took place there. Four major encounters are Despite enormous Japanese claims, only a usually included in this battle, occurring on 24 couple of Allied warships were seriously and 25 October 1944: air attacks on the Japanese damaged. On the other hand, massive numbers fleet transiting the Sibuyan Sea, 24 October; the of Japanese planes, intended as the key striking night engagement in Surigao Strait between force to be used in the Philippines were lost. The dreadnoughts of the Japanese and American loss of land based aircraft elevated the role of navies; the attacks on the Japanese decoy fleet Japanese warships from supporting to central in off Cape Engano; and the Japanese attack on the ensuing battle. American light carriers off Samar on 25 Willmott continues his assessment of October. Just listing the scope and variety of the battle well into November, pursuing his these actions, which are only the major events, argument that the Battle of Leyte Gulf was part suggests how monumental in scope this "battle" of the larger Pacific war dynamic. He partic• truly was. ularly stresses the growing impact of US carrier- Willmott starts by placing the battle in based aircraft being projected further into the greater context of the Pacific war. He argues heretofore Japanese controlled waters. The result that after their loss in the battle of the Philippine was an increasing strangulation of Japanese Sea in June 1944, the Japanese navy was really shipping, already started by submarines but already defeated. But they were far from ready significantly accelerated by carrier aircraft. Will• to acknowledge their real situation, and the mott argues that Japanese efforts to attack Leyte Americans failed to realize the scope of their Gulf barely adjusted the timetable of US oper• success. The Japanese did recognize that ations, reflecting the diminishing ability of the desperate measures were now required, and they Japanese to affect the pace and outcome of the prepared a series of plans to counter the next, war. inevitable, American advance. These plans The main focus of the book is at the centred on the Philippines, whose capture would command and operational levels, supported by isolate Japan from the resources that had been reference to strategic aspects needed to the original reason for war. Loss of these understand the factors affecting commanders. resources, especially the oil found in what is Tactical engagements are not often discussed, now Indonesia, would rapidly undermine although Willmott has carefully identified Book Reviews 99 participants and losses, providing clear tables to the Royal Naval Museum, 2005, xxix + 509 pp., assist readers in grasping the results of maps, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, engagements. The focus on the levels of warfare index, US $39.95, paper; ISBN 1-84383-130-9 most concerned with major decisions allows Willmott to tease out nuanced aspects of the In a brief literary survey of the Nelson decade by battles, and he is skilled at parsing situations and Eugene Rasor, one of this world's more historical evidence to winnow out every last indefatigable bibliographers, fifteen of 242 possibility. His prolonged discussion of some entries cite Colin White, Deputy Director of the points requires close attention on the part of Royal Naval Museum.) White's substantial readers. General readers may find it a little contribution to the Trafalgar bicentenary tedious, but the thorough dissection of ideas, includes the so-called Nelson Letters Project, including historiographical aspects when which has turned up more than 1300 previously necessary, provides an extremely good overview undiscovered or overlooked letters. Five hundred of this battle. He clearly is a master of the and seven of them appear in this volume. voluminous literature on this battle, and the Because there is so much new material, and Pacific war in general. because it covers "almost every important stage The supporting parts of this book are in Nelson's career" the editor writes that "... in quite well done. There are nine clearly drawn a sense, this book is almost Nelson's maps that sketch the strategic setting, the major autobiography" (xv). "Almost" is the key word. engagements, and also two subsequent US One may see the events of Lord Nelson's life carrier operations in November after the battle. through his own eyes when reading his Nine detailed tables set out statistical enormous and masterful epistolary output, and information on a range of relevant subjects, these selections have certainly enhanced our providing support for the author's arguments. understanding of the man and his work, but they There are no less than fourteen appendices still do not constitute the whole man or the where the author lists orders of battles, ship whole life. Even combined with the preceding fates, shipping losses and reasons for losses, and and very large published collections, there are even engages in a detailed analysis of Halsey's irreplaceable gaps. As White points out, Nelson notorious decision to leave the Straits of San burned all Emma Hamilton's letters to him, and Bernardino unguarded on the night of 24 it is only through Fanny's letters to Nelson's October. Finally, eleven photographs provide agent Alexander Davison - not included in this pictures of the principal leaders and warships book - that we have found out previously studied in the book. unknown aspects of the marriage breakdown. As There is unlikely to ever be a last word the most reputable of his countless biographers on a battle as vast and momentous as Leyte Gulf. have demonstrated, Nelson was a brilliant Willmott's assessment is an excellent summary apologist for his own interests, and he really has of all that is currently known, and provides an to be seen through other eyes than his own in insightful and aggressively argued perspective order to assess his true worth. that covers the operational and command aspects Biographies now appearing do make quite well. Though not always an easy read, this use of the Nelson Letters Project - a triumph of book is one that expert and even general interest team research - but their documentation goes readers should not pass by. well beyond Nelson's own output. That being said, the selections published in this volume are Doug McLean an indispensable source for any reassessment. Chilliwack, British Columbia White has organized the material chrono• logically, except for an opening section that he calls "The Man and the Admiral." Each section Colin White (ed.), Nelson: The New Letters, has a very useful introduction that places the London; Boydell and Brewer Press, in asso• letters in context and directs the reader to ciation with the National Maritime Museum and specific examples illustrating certain 100 The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord characteristics or events. Three excellent appendices provide the chronology of Nelson's career, his ships, and "A Nelson's Who's Who" by John Graves of the National Maritime Museum. In his introduction, White explains the provenance of his material, which has come from archives and libraries in Britain, Denmark, Germany and the United States, and from some private collections, and in some cases from previously published letters that had been too extensively revised by their editors. Maps and illustrations complement the text very well. In the section on "The Man and the Admiral," White takes examples of letters that reveal Nelson's family ties, his friends and lovers, his popular image, his dispensation of patronage and his humanity. He has not included letters showing how Nelson himself used the patronage system to advance in the service, but throughout the five chronological sections that follow may be found his numerous letters to the Duke of Clarence by which he maintained that important connection to the future monarch. More might have been made of this trait. Edgar Vincent in his 2003 biography Nelson: Love & Fame, Andrew Lambert in Britannia's God of War and Roger Knight, whose The Pursuit of Victory is the latest biography of Nelson, all cite examples of Nelson's skill in self-advancement . Knight, after writing his book, observes that Nelson "still remains elusive; while his letters are open, illuminating and entertaining, they rarely reveal what he was feeling. In spite of a mass of surviving evidence, it is not clear exactly what drove Nelson to achieve such eminence." That observation sums up both the strengths and limitations of the Nelson letters. Neither expect to learn a great deal that biographers have not already told us, nor to learn everything there is to know about him, but read the letters, enjoy them, reflect on them and relish their quality. Thus the extraordinarily powerful Nelson legend goes on. Clearly, no naval library should be without this book.

W.A.B. Douglas Ottawa, Ontario