BOOK REVIEWS · 2012. 6. 26. · Book Reviews 85 with the impact this will have on an island nation and its maritime communities at sea and ashore. By definition the book presents

BOOK REVIEWS

Graeme J. Milne (ed.). New Researchers '97:Papers presented at the fifth annual NewReserarchers in Maritime History Conference.Liverpool: Centre for Port and Maritime History,1997 [orders to: NMGM Enterprises 127 DaleStreet, Liverpool L69 3LA, England]. viii + 93pp., tables, maps, illustrations, appendices. £2 (+£1 s+h), spiral-bound; no ISBN.

In his editor's preface, Graeme Milne explainsthat the papers appearing in this publication wereread in 1997 during an annual conference of newresearchers. Sponsored by the Centre for Po rt andMaritime History (a joint endeavour by theUniversity of Liverpool and the NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside), and heldat Liverpool, this meeting offered a platform forone Dutch, one Italian, and seven Britishscholars, most of whom were undertaking theirfirst major work in maritime history. Milne notesthat not all of the part icipants were young sincemature individuals retiring from careers in otherareas increasingly are entering the field. He alsopoints out that the papers were not refereed byother scholars. But Milne observes that hisvolume "places the results of current and recentresearch in the public domain for discussion andfeedback, and it does so quickly." [v]

Three articles in New Contributions '97 wereof particular interest to this reader. One is No J.van Loo's discussion of the role of Dutchprivateering during the first stages (1568-1609) ofthe Dutch revolt from Spain. Van Loo, a graduatestudent at the University of Leiden, defines fourdistinct phases of this campaign. In general, heargues that the objective of the privateers shiftedfrom the strategic defense of the emerging DutchRepublic to an effo rt to enrich the owners ofprivateers. The final era van Loo discusses (1604-1609) featured a massive influx of English shipsfollowing the outlawing of privateering inEngland.

Neil Ashcroft, a former solicitor and now adoctoral candidate at the Universi ty of Hull,contributes an insightful paper entitled "Britishtrade with the Confederacy during the American

Civil War." Ashcroft's subject is Britishcommerce with po rts in Mexico and theCaribbean which were transshipment points forthe Confederacy. This focus is a welcomedeparture from the more usual treatment of theblockade from a US continental viewpoint.Ashcroft demonstrates that the value of theNorth's blockade was to create a bottleneck thatrestricted most oceanic access to the mainland tospecialized steam ships. Those vessels had farless carrying capacity than the sailing ships usedon the trans-Atlantic trade routes.

Roger Mumby-Croft, another graduatestudent from the University of Hull, was acommercial fishermen for a qua rter of a century.His experiences, as well as solid research in thesources, are revealed in a graphic account ofworking conditions on United Kingdom fishingtrawlers during the 1950-1970 era. The high ratesof mortality, injury, and illness suffered byBritish fishermen are contrasted with theexperiences of their Scandinavian and Germancounterparts. Fishermen from the latter countriesworked under much safer conditions.

The remaining papers presented in thisvolume cover a broad range of other subjects,including the inte rnational regulation of DanubeRiver shipping, the Royal Navy's presence inManila Bay during the Spanish-American War,shipping company posters, scurvy and choleraoutbreaks in the Royal Navy, and the uncertaincompetence of British masters and mates in thenineteenth century.

Graeme Milne and his associates at theCentre for Po rt and Maritime History deservecongratulations for their encouragement of newmembers of the maritime history guild. Basedupon the work appearing in New Scholars '97these individuals are being well trained by theirBritish, Dutch, and Italian mentors. Forgraybeards such as this reviewer, it is hearteningto realize that a promising new group of maritimehistorians is standing in the wings.

Dean C. AllardArlington, Virginia

83

84 The Northern Mariner

Uwe Schnall and Ursula Feldkamp (eds.).Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv XIX (1996). Hamburg: Ernst Kabel Verlag for the DeutschesSchiffahrtsmuseum, 1996. 422 pp., photographs,tables, illustrations, figures (incl. end jacket),maps. DM 46, paper; ISBN 3-8225-0396-7.

The breadth and depth of the subject we callmaritime history could not be more clearly de-monstrated than it is by this very well producedannual publication for 1996 of the DeutschesSchiffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven. The variouspapers cover the centuries and geographical loca-tions, from the Indian Ocean in classical timeswith "The Factual Description of a Sea Route toIndia and Ceylon" derived from the PeriplusMaris Erythnaei of the late first century A.D. (apaper printed in English) to, at the other end ofthe scale in time and subject, Wolfgang Rudolf'sreport on the manufacture of auxiliary engines forfishing boats and small trading vessels in northGermany between 1903 and 1945.

In between on the time scale are papers on,among other subjects, fishing and whaling, thelives of a steel four-masted barque and of anicebreaker, polar and ocean exploration, and fer rytransport. There are papers on the fishing boats ofthe upper Main river and a most interesting pieceon Samish sewn boat building. Three papers ondifferent aspects of maritime social history in-clude one dealing with the practice of making"maiden voyage" or "first visit" presentations tonew vessels, a form of salutation which hasdeveloped widely in recent years. The papers areby no means of exclusively German interest, andthey are not a closed source to those unable toread German since each paper has what is usuallya very comprehensive English-language sum-mary.

With a publication in this scale — there areseventeen papers, all fully referenced, some withlong bibliographies and all adequately illustrated— a reviewer can but commend the scholarship,editorial skill, and organisation which enables arelatively small museum to produce it. This is thenineteenth of these Bremerhaven publications andtogether they must provide a very valuable re-search resource.

Basil GreenhillSaltash, Cornwall

Steve Humphries. The Call of the Sea: Britain'sMaritime Past 1900-1960. London: BBC Books,1997. 192 pp., photographs, illustrations, sug-gested reading, index. £16.99, cloth; ISBN 0-563-38722-X.

Steve Humphries is a well-known oral historianwho has produced a number of life-history books,including Hooligans or Rebels, A Century ofChildhood, and A Secret World of Sex. He is cur-rently Vice-President of the Oral History Socie tyand recently became director of an independentproduction company, Testimony Films, whichspecializes in oral history documentaries. To thecompany's credit are three major documentaryseries for the BBC — A Labour of Love, Forbid-den Britain, and A Man's World. Books have alsobeen produced to accompany the documentaries.To this list must now be added Call of the Seaand the television series which it accompanies.

Through oral testimony, both provide aglimpse at Britain's maritime past. They showhow Britain, as an island, has always had stronglinks with the sea, and consequently the sea andall it evokes is an integral part of our society andits culture. They therefore look at many ofBritain's maritime traditions including the RoyalNavy, Merchant Navy, fishing industry, and sea-rescue serv ices. They present the testimony ofthose whose voices have not always been heard,those below-deck crews, for example, who wereinvolved in mutinies, women mariners, and thosewho went against tradition and convention andentered a life at sea.

Sadly, what Call of the Sea recalls is thegradual decline of Britain's sea power in the latterhalf of this century. It does this by actually detail-ing the very lives of those whose skills and wayof life are waning: Scots herring girls who couldgut thirty or forty fish a minute, for example, ortrawler deck hands who would work for dayswithout sleep in very rough waters. It also looksquite interestingly at a less publicized, perhapsdarker, side of life at sea and explores the uncon-ventional delights of life ashore in foreign lands,and the rebellions against overbearing, or incom-petent officers at sea. Through such accounts wesee how, since the end of World War II, Britainhas lost most of its sea power, and that this de-cline and erosion was deep-rooted and foresee-able long before the 1950s. The concern now is

Book Reviews 85

with the impact this will have on an island nationand its maritime communities at sea and ashore.

By definition the book presents a cursoryglimpse of the subject. l would like to have seena little more reflection and analysis, but perhapswhen such projects are rushed through produc-tion, this is understandable. Certainly it is welledited, and the illustrations, which are integratedthroughout the text, are a handsome addition, tell-ing a story in their own right. Generally, ofcourse, the voices speak for themselves and weshould be thankful that they have been recordedbefore they are lost forever.

Chris Howard BaileyPortsmouth, England

Hugh Richard Slotten. Patronage, Practice, andthe Culture of American Science: AlexanderDallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey. NewYork: Cambridge Universi ty Press, 1994. xi +228 pp., illustrations, notes, index. US $49.95,cloth; ISBN 0-521-43395-9.

During my formal education many years ago, Iwas informed that the United States Coast andGeodetic Survey was to be regarded as a giant inprecise surveying. No one explained why. Thisbook about the second superintendent of the USCoast Survey goes far to explain the rise to suchprominence, which occurred in the mid 1800s.

Alexander Dall as Bache was the great-grand-son of Benjamin Franklin. It therefore comes asno surprise that he had connections to many poli-tical giants of his day, that he was indoctrinatedin a sense of loyalty to family and count ry , andthat he was committed to public se rv ice, intellec-tual self-improvement and social elitism. More-over, he was educated at the US Military Acad-emy at West Point where he received probablythe best scientific education then available in hiscountry . The Academy wanted to produce officersas enlightened men of science, so Bache gained asolid background in many forms of science andgraduated first in his class. After two years, heresigned from the Corps of Engineers and ac-cepted a professorship of chemistry and naturalphilosophy at Universi ty of Philadelphia. Fromthis position, he became a leader in the scientificcommunity in the United States. Within sevenyears, he was elected president of Girard College

and spent two years in Europe studying educa-tional institutions. After another seven years, andin at least part ial consequence of a campaign bythe scientific community and his political friendsin his behalf, he was appointed superintendent ofthe Coast Survey, succeeding the first superinten-dent, Ferdinand Hassler.

Congress had established the Coast Surveyin 1807 to chart the country's coastline. Hasslerhad been doing this slowly because he insisted inconnecting the hydrography through to a highprecision triangulation network. Hassler had runafoul with the Treasury Department concerninghis expenses and general operation, with theresult that his ambitious vision remained unrea-lized. Nevertheless, it paved the way for Bache'ssuccess. Bache not only smoothed the Treasury'sruffled feathers but was able to expand his budgetto gargantuan propo rtions compared to thegovernment's other scientific branches. It cer-tainly helped that he used his budget wisely tosponsor consulting se rv ices by the outside scien-tific community.

Chapters 1 and 2 of the book examine thevalues and commitments that guided Bache'sscientific work. The elitist convictions and moralconcerns of his family and friends in Philadelphiawere especially impo rtant to his development.Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the early history of theCoast Survey and Bache's efforts to gain controlwhen Hassler died. The next three chaptersexamine the major themes in the history of theCoast Survey using detailed archival sources.Chapter 5 explores Bache's strategies to gainsupport and maintain control, Chapter 6 exploresthe role of the Coast Survey as a source of patron-age and Chapter 7 examines the social practicesBache developed.

The text includes few technical details, butthere are several interesting reproductions of earlycharts, etchings and early photographs. I amuncertain if it is Slotten's or his sources' error buthe quotes the accuracy of the baseline for triangu-lation networks as ±0.02 inches in a baseline ofsix miles. Modern survey error analysis showsthat this is totally over-optimistic by a hundred-fold. Perhaps it is just as well that Slotten staysaway from technicalities.

David GrayOttawa, Ontario


Alan Russett. George Chambers 1803-1840 . HisLife and Work. The Sailor's Eye and the Artist'sHand. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Wappingers'Falls, NY: Antique Collectors' Club, 1996. 216pp., illustrations (b+w & colour plates), appen-dices, bibliography, index. US $89.95, cloth;ISBN 1-85149-233-X.

The lack of reliable scholarly monographs onBritish marine artists is often felt by connoisseursand those working professionally in the field ofmarine painting. It is quite clear that the reproduc-tion of individual paintings as illustrations ofhistorical texts does not throw enough light on theplace a painting has in an artist's œuvre. As aresult, and with the exception of sho rt entrancesin dictionaries or cursory remarks in other publi-cations, little is known about George Chambers,whose works both in oil and watercolour are ofremarkable quality. A biographical memoir byJohn Watkins, a close friend of Chambers, pub-lished immediately after the painter's death, wasthe starting point for this book by Alan Russett.The author rightly points out that Chamber unde-servedly achieved neither the high profile of someof his contemporaries during his lifetime nor attri-bution of his rightful place in the a rt history of hisperiod and of British marine painting.

Born in Whitby the son of an ordinary sea-man, Chambers lacked the opportunity to receivean academic education as a painter. After movingto London he worked hard to improve his s ty leand technical skills. He met people who took aninterest in his work as a marine painter and intro-duced him to influential personalities. Eventuallyhe even enjoyed royal patronage. Besides earlyworks as a panorama and theatrical painter hisoeuvre falls into three principal categories: theworks from nature depicting sea and sky, shipsand people; river-side scenes; and naval engage-ments for which he is probably best known.

His whole career is meticulously describedby Russett, who uses biographical data and in-dividual paintings to outline the life and work ofthis neglected painter. Very skillfully he com-bines the biographical narrative with an assess-ment of Chambers' achievements as a marineartist. His language is free of any jargon thatcould be difficult to understand or would impingeon the pleasure of reading the text. Lavishlyillustrated, the book allows the reader to look at

many paintings and compare them with theauthor's interpretation. At times, the quotationsfrom Watkins' memoir were too long; ofteninterrupting the modern narrative. Nevertheless,this book should appeal to those who love to havenineteenth-century marine art presented in a con-vincing and pleasant way.

Lars U. SchollBremerhaven, Germany

Jamie Benidickson. Idleness, Water, and a Ca-noe: Reflections on Paddling for Pleasure.Toronto and Buffalo: Universi ty of TorontoPress, 1997. xii + 299 pp., photographs, notes,index. $55, £41, cloth; ISBN 0-8020-0945-X.$17.95, £13, paper; ISBN 0-8020-7910-5. Dis-tributed in Europe by Marston Books Se rv ices,Abingdon, Oxon.

It must be tough to be a canoe (or a beaver or ahockey player, for that matter). After all, life as anational symbol is not easy. The hours are long,the expectations high, and everyone is convincedthat they know what you mean. It is a good thingthat the canoe's carrying capacity is legendary,for this slim craft has often been freighted with aheck of a lot of metaphorical baggage. It helps toremember as you read this book that sometimes,a canoe is just a canoe. In Idleness, Water and aCanoe: Reflections on Paddling for Pleasure,Ottawa law professor Jamie Benidickson exploressome of the meanings the canoe has assumed inCanadian life and culture.

He traces its progress through advertisingi mages of strength, vitality and cleanliness, fol-lows its use as a metaphor by many politicalfigures, of whom Pierre Trudeau is only the mostrecent, and examines the beneficial effects of can-oeing on its part icipants. Other chapters addressthe evolution of the form and construction of thecanoe itself, the use and/or appropriation of nativedesigns and metaphors, preparations for canoetrips, women and the wilderness, and canoeing'srelationship to the environmental movement.

Benidickson has clearly done his homeworkfor this book. The end notes are detailed anduseful, the book is well indexed, and the subjectis quite obviously one close to the author's heart.The subject is also close to Canada's heart, andthe appearance of any significant work on the

Book Reviews 87

canoe should be an impo rtant event, for like mostnational symbols, the canoe is too often men-tioned glibly and taken for granted, and too littlestudied in depth. There is a real need to not giveour national symbols a free ride, but to try andunderstand just what role they have played in ourregional and national life, and how they came tooccupy such a place. Unfortunately, this is not thebook to do it.

Part of the problem lies in the author's ownambitions for the book, most clearly expressed inthe last paragraph of the text: "can anything beconfidently asserted about paddling for pleasure,an activity that is more likely taken for granted byparticipants...than treated as a subject worthy ofpenetrating analysis?...perhaps these pages haveraised a number of intriguing — possibly evenimportant — themes and questions." [256] Thatseems an awfully modest place to arrive afterleading the reader through so many pages of text.While it may be acceptable for a journal article,perhaps, or a preliminary exploration of a topic,should it really take a whole book to reach such anon-conclusion?

Too often, Benidickson takes the words ofrailway brochure copywriters and outdoor educa-tion advocates at face value. The health andspiritual benefits of contact with the wildernessthrough canoeing are endlessly reiterated by aparade of quotations from camp councillors,clergy and government officials. These opinionsare too seldom analysed by the author for whatother meanings they might reveal. The Englishpoet Rupe rt Brooke, who saw in the Canadianwilderness "only pools of water and lumps ofearth" [56] is far outnumbered here by enthusias-tic pantheists, muscular campers and adherents ofthe pathetic fallacy. There is clearly somethinggoing on that would be worth exploring further,but Benidickson, with few exceptions, re frainsfrom analysis. To be fair, he does occasionallyreject purely anecdotal evidence of canoeing'stransformative power and call for more study. Itis unfortunate that he did not seize the oppor-tunity to do so in this book.

But perhaps that is placing too high anexpectation on a book that is, after all, subtitled asa "reflection." One could have wished for more ofBenidickson's own reflections upon those whomhe quotes so frequently, but then that may be thetask of the next volume. Idleness, Water and a

Canoe certainly attests to how impo rtant a field ofstudy this could be.

John SummersEtobicoke, Ontario

Robert J.C. Mowat. The Logboats of Scotland.Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1996. ix + 166 pp.,illustrations, photographs, tables, bibliography,index. £24, US $40, paper; ISBN 1-900188-11-2.Distributed in North America by The DavidBrown Book Company, Oakville, CT.

This book represents the first volume on Scottishlogboats to be published in 130 years. It clearlydocuments the logboats excavated in Scotlandlargely from the Victorian era to the present, andpresents an explanation of the criteria used foridentification and classification of the boats andrelated archaeological finds. The latter sectionpresents an analysis of the logboats and artifactsdocumented in a "Gazeteer" and brings togetherthe principal sources of research in the field.

A logboat can be basically classified as aboat of over three metres in length, shaped froma single log from which the bark and sapwoodhave been removed. It also has fittings such asthwarts, ribs and stabilizers and can take severalforms: canoe, punt, dissimilar and/or box. Theyare found in or near a watercourse, often inassociation with other marine artifacts such asoars and paddles. [2]

Logboats are of a very simple design requir-ing only rudimentary tools and limited technolo-gical skills to construct. Despite their simplicitythey were well suited to the long weste rn coast-line of Scotland with all its sea lochs and islands,to say nothing of the huge number of inland lochsand rivers. The book discusses the distribution oflogboat finds and relates them to the availabilityof wood for boat building. The author also out-lines various methods of determining the age ofeach of the logboats and relates this to the multi-plicity of artifacts found in many of the sites,discussing the significance of each.

The main section of the book is the "Gaze-teer of Logboat Discoveries," which documentslocation, history of the discovery, construction,dimensions and previous research. These data areclearly set out and will be a prime reference forreaders. The material is complimented with


photographs and drawings of the logboats, andenlivened by nineteenth-century illustrations ofthe discoveries and their locations.

The next chapter on related artifact finds issimilarly organised, providing a quick and valu-able reference source. It is evident from these twochapters that the author has researched everyavailable source, both published and unpublished,and has followed up recent research. He is, inmany instances, able to give a balanced judge-ment of the documented evidence and access thenature of these fascinating finds which includewooden bowls, paddles, log coffins, oars, andtroughs.

The synthesis and analysis section gives arange of tables including comparisons for logboatpreservation in specific areas of Scotland, lengthsof boats, and sizes of oars and paddles. Theanalysis details the geographical distribution andhistory of discovery of artifacts and boats, weigh-ing up the merits of the Victorian antiquaries whoinitiated these studies. It is to be especially wel-comed that the author introduces data from simi-lar European logboat sites and compares themwith the Scottish evidence.

In his conclusion, Mowat argues for contin-ued work on the subject and the impo rtance oflogboats in "wetland archaeology." The authorexpresses his wish that he has demonstrated thesignificance of logboats and that their importancewill be recognised through his study. Given thedetail and accessibility of information presentedin this monograph, Robe rt Mowat has succeededin his principal objective. The work is a well-researched volume, clearly laid out and balancedwith excellent data tables and useful illustrations.

For anyone requiring a reference work onthis subject, Mowat has provided the material ina very clear and accessible manner, backed up byan excellent bibliography. Although aimed at thespecialist reader, the volume will help broadenthe knowledge of those whose prime interest ismaritime studies in the historical era. The book isa valuable contribution to maritime studies in thatit adds a concise work on the material culture ofthe prehistoric period and, for the first time,brings together all available sources into onevolume.

John F. EdwardsAberdeen, Scotland

Jenny Sarrazin and André van Holk. Schopperund Zillen: Eine Einführung in den traditionellenHolzschiffbau im Gebiet der deutschen Donau.Hamburg: Ernst Kabel for the Deutsches Schif-fahrtsmuseum, 1996. 205 pp., photographs, maps,illustrations, figures, bibliography. DM 98, cloth;ISBN 3-8225-0334-7.

For years the researchers of the Deutsches Schif-fahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven have investigatedtraditional German inland navigation, folk boat-building and the movement of timber. In thecourse of this work they have developed a com-plete inventory of boat types and of boatbuilders'workshops. They have also found documentationfor old and still surviving boats and ships. All thishas been described and published either as mono-graph or specialist mono-thematic art icles. Onesuch work is Schopper und Zillen, published in1996. The two authors are talented, well-trainedresearchers connected with the museum.

The focus of the book is clearly identified inits title. Schopper refers, in the terminology of theDanube waterside, to a shipwright specializing inbuilding boats and ships caulked with moss. Thiswas grouted into pre-cut slits between the staves,which were tightened with slats fastened to theskin by metal clamps. Such a solution, known asearly as the first- and second-century era ofRoman colonization, was employed elsewhere inEurope as well. It was, for instance, used in theconstruction of the cog ships in the Middle Ages.In the Danube region this method of caulkingpersisted into the modern era, in particular in theZille-type watercraft of the upper Danube, thesubject of the main part of the book.

In their Introduction, the authors explain thepeculiar character of shipping on the upper,German part of the Danube. This is followed byfive chapters which deal with various aspects ofthe construction, employment, and handling ofthe Zille river boats. The second chapter, forinstance, presents a history of the development,with variants, of the vessel type, and identifiesthose boats traditionally called Zille which stillexist in the Danube waterside (mainly in theregion of Ulm). Here we learn that there is noagreement on the origin of the name Zille — inold Latin sources it appears as navicilla. Nor isthere agreement about the Slavonic character ofthe vessel. Its main characteristics are a flat

Book Reviews 89

bottom, flush planking of sides and a block stem.In some variants there is a block stern as well.The third and fourth chapters discuss the con-struction of of the Zille boats, with descriptions ofthe riverside workshops in which they were built.Explanations are provided of the building tech-nique and methods of caulking the hulls. Thus, tocaulk the bottom, the craft was lifted almost to thevertical position (Schoppen). One of the mostimportant tools in this operation was the Schop-per, a wooden caulking chisel. Sometimes specialclamps called Schopperklammern were used toassist in pressing down the moss used as caulkingmaterial. Inevitably, perhaps, the constructionyards became known as Schopperplatzen whilethe people who specialized in this kind of workwere known as Schopper. Other chapters describethe various ways in which the Zille boats wereemployed — for fishing, transporting people andgoods, gravel excavation, recreation, and occa-sionally during the waterside festivals. Here wealso learn about the technique of driving andsteering the Zille boats. The book concludes witha list of the extensive literature on the subject.

The strengths of Schopper und Zillen are thefull usage that has been made of all availablematerials, the huge number of illustrations, in-cluding archival materials, the detailed descrip-tion of the last Zille boats as well as of somevessels that bear a close resemblance to Zillen.Together these make the book a valuable docu-mentary record, while the descriptions, commentsand analyses make it one of the most importantresearch efforts on shipwright studies to appear inEurope during the last few years. If there is aweakness, it is the lack of an English summary orpicture captions.

Jerzy LitwinGdansk, Poland

R.H. Barnes. Sea Hunters of Indonesia: Fishersand Weavers of Lamalera. Oxford and NewYork: Clarendon Press and Oxford UniversityPress, 1996. xxii + 467 pp., maps, photographs,figures, tables, appendices, notes, sources, in-dices. £50, US $98, Cdn $135, cloth; ISBN 0-19-828070-X.

Barnes begins with a sho rt monograph [35-149]summarizing the social anthropology of a distinc-

tive Indonesian maritime community, proceedingthen to deal in exemplary detail with the maritimeadaptation which makes it so distinctive. Lama-lera is situated on the southern coast of Lembata,the main island lying between Flores and Pantar/Alor. Tradition tells of an ancestral party comingto the place by sea and asserting domin ance overinland cultivators there by dint of arms. Lamalerais a maritime settlement oriented to huntingsharks, turtles, manta rays, and sea mammals.This is the sole Indonesian community steadilyengaged in a hunt which includes the big-toothedkiller and sperm whales.

The greater part of the book describes thetraditional culture, artifacts and technics, practicalarts and supporting ritual. Lamalera womenweave and resist-dye cloths which feature impor-tantly in their inland trading. Men are fully occu-pied with seafaring and the work connected withtheir longboats — building and rebuilding thecomplex hulls, weaving the sail squares, obtain-ing the materials, and seeing to ritual and techni-cal preparations for the hunt.

Eight chapters are devoted to the boats andtheir crews. For the most part, the material is acomprehensive synthesis of documented informa-tion and terminology with observational detailfrom the author's several sho rt visits. Thesebegan in 1970 and were capped by a drop-in visitin 1995, the body of the fieldwork being done innine months (in 1979 and 1982) using the na-tional language Bahasa Indonesia. Some effo rt ismade to take account of acculturative change inquite recent times, but Barnes is at greater painsto set his study within the region and its recordedpast. This he does by devoting special chapters toregional history, the maritime environment, andthe importance of contacts through whaling withTimor and the early commercial development ofPacific marine resources. Throughout, there areample references in the Notes [377-402] to docu-mentary sources and pertinent anecdotal stuff.

The seven appendices compile in a series oftables and lists most of the hard and linguisticdata a reader might want to have at hand, fromkin terms to marine and useful plant species, boatmeasurements, and even clues to identifying(from sail patterns) the twenty-nine Lamaleraboats which were working in 1979! As one mightexpect, the References are inclusive. I think noone will fault the author for sending a book out


ill-provisioned.The book's strongest contribution is to our

knowledge of the ancient arts of seamanshipvanishing now from the southwestern Pacific asthey did a fair century ago from the northeastern.There is a wealth of detail on such technics asplanking, strengthening, and rigging the boats, onthe tools and weapons used, and design features,all meant to satisfy future archaeologists wishingto trace the detailed history and early spread ofthe sea hunter's art on what will eventually haveto be a global scale. Technically, the whalers'boats need to meet standards of seaworthinessunder stress which the more elegant war canoesor even the great long-distance outriggers of thePacific do not. Beyond this, the book will be val-ued as a major source on the Savu Sea region, oneof those small-world encyclopedias which throwa special light on the rest of our knowledge.

George ParkCharlottetown, Prince Edward Island

Richard MacCullagh. The Irish Currach Folk.Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1993. 192 pp., photo-graphs, figures, illustrations, maps, appendices,bibliography, index. £18.99, US $38, cloth; ISBN0-86327-341-6. Distributed in No rth America byDufour Editions, Chester Springs, PA.

The Irish currach is one of the world's mostdistinctive vernacular watercraft. At first glance,this new book, with its title and a stunning colourjacket-photo of four boatmen with their currachs,appears to offer a welcome, in-depth look at thesefascinating small boats and their owners, possiblywithin historical and cultural contexts. But ap-pearances can be deceiving, and that is certainlythe case here. Rather than presenting a tightlyfocused study of Irish boatmen and their currachs,it seeks to tell the nine-thousand-year story of the"currach folk" from the first landing of people onIrish soil through to the twentieth century.

What follows are twenty-five chapters that,among other things, try to suppo rt the author'shypothesis that people in currachs played a majorrole in the exploration and settlement of thecoastal regions of the eastern No rth Atlantic. Thesheer number and variety of topics addressed areastonishing, including the development of Euro-pean watercraft and subsequent voyaging in the

Mediterranean, the No rth Sea, the No rth Atlanticand elsewhere, the settlement of Ireland, earlySpanish connections with Ireland, the origin andevolution of the currach, the voyage of Brendanand tales of Atlantis, the establishment of Irishmonasteries, British migrations to Brittany, earlyvoyages to Iceland and Greenland, the distribu-tion, variation, and use of currachs in the westcoast of Ireland in this century, recent threats tothe continuity of traditional culture on the islandsof the west of Ireland, a 1963 voyage in a currachto mark the 1,400th anniversary of Colm Cille'smission to Iona, currach racing in the twentiethcentury, and the depiction of currachs in Robe rtFlaherty's film Man of Aran. All chapters are dis-turbingly brief — most are under seven pages —and connections between them are often difficultto grasp. One receives the impression that theauthor has merely unpacked a seabag full of allthe miscellaneous information about currachs andother aspects of Irish history and culture he hasaccumulated over the years, without bothering toexpend sufficient energy reviewing the scholarlyliterature, developing the themes that have at-tracted his attention, and constructing a coherentand compelling study.

In nearly every case, reading each chapter islike sailing into a dense fog bank of sweepingspeculations, unsubstantiated "facts," superficialanalysis, and jarring omissions and discontinu-ities. Pe rt inent scholarship is largely ignored asthe author reaches one dubious conclusion afteranother about such things as the origin and diffu-sion of the currach, and the exploration andsettlement of the No rth Atlantic region. In addi-tion, he fails to explain adequately the book'scentral concept, that of an Irish currach folk. Forexample, he does not reveal why one aspect ofmaterial culture — the currach — should be thedefining cultural attribute of a people who, hemaintains, are responsible for the exploration andsettlement of much of the No rth Atlantic region.These are all very significant shortcomings.

To be fair, the book does have some redeem-ing features. For example, the author's descrip-tions of his own experiences with inhabitants ofislands off the coast of northwestern Ireland —currachmen and their families — are quite strong.Although somewhat romanticized and quite brief,they are well-observed accounts of aspects of lifein the islands during the mid-twentieth century.

Book Reviews 91

(It is a pity that MacCullagh did not focus hisbook here instead of on subjects about which heis obviously vastly less capable of handling.)Also noteworthy is an appendix containing usefulempirical data about contemporary currachs,including scale drawings recorded in the field.Here as well as elsewhere in the book, there are anumber of outstanding documentary photographsof currachs in use along the Irish coast. However,since most of the images are not properly identi-fied as to date, place, subject, photographer, andsource, their value to researchers is limited.

In the final analysis, this odd book hasprecious little to offer. While responsibility forthe many deficiencies of The Irish Currach Folkmust be assigned to the author, some — and by nomeans an insubstantial amount — must also beassigned to the editors who miserably failed topay proper attention to the book's focus, internalorganization, accuracy, and relationship to exist-ing literature.

David A. TaylorWashington, DC

Albrecht Sauer. Das 'Seebuch': Das ältesteerhaltene Seehandbuch und die

spätmittelalterlicheNavigation in Nordwesteuropa [The `See-buch'. The oldest surviving sea instruction andlate medieval navigation in north-westernEurope]. Hamburg: Ernst Kabel for the DeutschesSchiffahrtsmuseum, 1996. 256 pp., photoplates(b+w, colour), illustrations, figures, bibliography.DM 78, cloth; ISBN 3-8225-0395-9.

This study of piloting in northwestern Europe inthe late fifteenth century is based on a well-known Low German manuscript found in Ham-burg known as the Seebuch (Sea-book). Broughtto us by the Bremerhaven seafaring museum, itconfirms the reputation for solid scholarship thatGerman researchers enjoy in the field of medievalshipbuilding and navigation. Illustrated, indexedand supported by 1,300 notes and 650 titles, thetext is clear and compact. Albrecht Sauer hasdelivered an important contribution to the historyof sailing.

While previous study of watermarks hasdated the manuscript itself to 1470, Sauer estab-lishes that its fourteen chapters arose in threedifferent periods and regions. The oldest chapters

trace to fourteenth-century Brittany and representa pure northwestern European tradition. Themiddle stratum arises from early fifteenth-centuryHanseatic knowledge and its sty le is already moresyncretic. The youngest chapters transmit bothDutch and Breton information, presented in aMediterranean s ty le.

To understand the author's periodisation is toenter the world of medieval piloting. In contrastto mariners in the Mediterranean, a sea withouttide or current and whose routes traversed anopen, unfathomable sea, mariners in the restlessAtlantic waters remained within a "sea-view" ortwo of the coast upon the continental shelf wherethey "treaded their way" by sounding. The adventof the compass allowed these mariners to recordthe moon's position when sail-defying tidalstreams turned or when high water opened theapproaches to a po rt .

Yet compasses were not always the preciseinstruments they were to become. The oldeststratum of the Seebuch refers to a 16-point com-pass, the later passages to a 32-point instrument.The early readings also contain a variable elementof error for the lunar positions at high tide — thesow's ear that lets Sauer craft his silk purse. Bymeasuring the error for each po rt, from Gibraltarto Flanders, he finds the greatest accuracy inBrittany. This analysis, confirmed by other in-dices, leads him to place the origin of the oldestchapters in the monastery of Saint-Mathieu nearConquet. If there is a weakness, it is in explainingwhy the oldest Atlantic sea instruction shouldderive from a Breton cloister. Reference to Frenchstudies by J. Bernard, H. Touchard or J. Kerhervéof the Bordeaux wine convoy to England andFlanders, all absent from the bibliography, wouldhave shown-that the convoy's pilotage, insuranceand customs were controlled by the dukes ofBrittany and administered by a chamberlain whowas also, in the fifteenth century, the abbot ofSaint-Mathieu.

In the book's second half, the pilot's art isexamined. After debunking the myths of the"Dutchman's log" and ce rtain Norse artifacts,Sauer transports us to the medieval pilot's side bycopiously citing the Seebuch. Even more elemen-tal than the compass is the sound, allowing thepilot to find his road, called the trade (tradewinds? to tread?), by a combination of depths andsea-floor characteristics such as the pebbles and


shells that adhere to a lump of tallow upon thesound. Distant landfalls and landmarks are indeli-bly named and described. Entering po rt, wesquint with the pilot to line up steeples, streetsand trees to pass safely within a "bow-shot" ofreefs and bars.

While the author shows how north-westernpiloting differed from that of the Mediterranean,he leaves the reader to draw corollaries related tothe trans-Atlantic extension of European sail ageneration later. If Mediterranean conditions ledto the portolan, the astrolabe and other instru-ments of pelagic navigation, northwestern Euro-pean seas could not have been conquered withoutfirst mastering the a rt of sounding and predictingtidal flows. Lacking this a rt , southern Europeanswere handicapped in waters such as the gulf andestuary of the St. Lawrence. True, learning topilot in new seas was the task of generations,which helps explain why Hydrography figured inthe first university curriculum in Canada in theseventeenth century. Yet once of age, St. Law-rence piloting reflected much of the traditioncontained in the Seebuch.

Brad LoewenQuébec, Québec

Peter Firstbrook. The Voyage of the Matthew:John Cabot and the Discovery of North America.London: BBC Books and Toronto: McClelland &Stewart, 1997. 192 pp., photographs (b+w, col-our), illustrations, maps, side-bars, appendices,notes, bibliography, index. £17.99, Cdn $35,cloth; ISBN 0-563-38764-5 (BBC), 0-7710-3121-1 (M&S).

The publication of this book commemorates thefive hundred-year anniversary of the arrival ofJohn Cabot in North America, an event markedby academic conferences, civic celebrations, FirstNations' demonstrations, and the trans-Atlanticvoyage of a replica of Cabot's fifteenth-centurysailing vessel, the Matthew. Published by BBCPress, it serves as a companion to the six-partdocumentary series also produced by the author,Peter Firstbrook, a trained oceanographer with apersonal interest in sailing and ship restoration.The book is largely what one might expect froma BBC edition; full-colour reproductions ofpaintings and contemporary maps strive to recre-

ate Cabot's world while photographs of the newMatthew, in its various stages of design andconstruction or under sail with its appropriately-attired crew and cast of actors, put the reader onboard for the historic voyage. Stylized side barsprovide a slightly more detailed examination oftopics relevant to late-medieval maritime explora-tion, including the role of Marco Polo, climaticchange and the array of diseases that afflicted,and were communicated by, European sailors.The inclusion in the Appendices of translations ofthe original documents from the London archivesand contemporary quotations detailing Cabot'senterprise lends a historical flavour to the text,but this book is in no way a work of history.

Firstbrook's greatest serv ice is that he pro-vides the reader with a general outline of whathistorians know about Cabot's expeditions. Likehis contemporary Christopher Columbus, JohnCabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Cabboto) was born inGenoa and spent time in Venice before seekingemployment at the Spanish cou rt. He eventuallyfound his way to the po rt of Bristol, England andset sail on a western course for Cathay in 1497under the patronage of the first of the Tudormonarchs, Henry VII. The North American conti-nent interrupted Cabot's journey and theMatthew's landfall is recognized (for ceremonialreasons, at least) as Bonavista, Newfoundland.Firstbrook is among those who maintain thatCabot explored coastal Labrador and then theGulf of St. Lawrence before returning to a hero'swelcome in England where Hen ry VII grantedhim a royal pension and sufficient sponsorship tooutfit five ships for a second voyage. He set outagain in May 1498, and though at least one of hisships returned due to bad weather, the core of theexpedition was never heard from again.

Historians have speculated upon the fate ofCabot's second enterprise and Firstbrook showshe is more than eager to do the same. For in-stance, he echoes Ian Wilson's fanciful theory inJohn Cabot and the Matthew (reviewed in theJuly 1997 issue of TNM/LMN), that Cabot notonly reached No rth America but succeeded inmapping the entire eastern seaboard, only to fallvictim to Isabella and Ferdinand's henchman,Alonso de Hojeda, somewhere in the Gulf ofMexico. The Spanish court — satisfied to keep theEnglish from impinging upon its claims in the"New World" and loath to jeopardize the impend-

Book Reviews 93

ing marriage of Catherine of Aragon to the son ofEnglish king Hen ry VII, Arthur — suppressed thenews. As proof of the Bristol maritime achieve-ments in No rth America, Firstbrook holds up arecently-discovered map by Spanish cartographerJuan de la Cosa (c. 1500) which implies thatSpaniards may have encountered English mari-ners in the Gulf of Mexico. [136-45] This isheady stuff that reads much like the script to aLeonard Nimoy episode of "In Search of..." It setsthe mind to wonder, but it certainly does notqualify as the "meticulously researched" historicalwork described on the dust jacket.

Historians, and medievalists in pa rt icular,will be further disappointed by Firstbrook'sefforts to place Cabot in his social, cultural andtechnological context. The confusion over whatconstituted the medieval ship known as a hulk isminor. [60, 63] More serious is the author'sreliance upon dated assessments of late-medievalsociety as wholly debauched, illiterate and immo-bile. In Chapter 1, entitled "Cabot's World,"Firstbrook's preoccupation with accounts ofubiquitous monastic crime, wild Vatican orgies,and whoring nuns [24-5] makes for a colourfulread, but is not representative of the vitality of theperiod or the complex role the Roman churchplayed in medieval society. Firstbrook's charac-terization of the late-medieval world se rves hisgreater purpose which is to recognize the discov-eries of the 1490s as a watershed in European, ifnot world history, when "Europe emerged as iffrom a chrysalis from the intellectual gloom ofthe Middle Ages..." [147] Cabot's central role inthis metamorphosis is made clear, for he cap-tained what Firstbrook refers to as "the mostimportant ship in the English language." [I I]

Like the modern Matthew — equipped withstate-of-the-art navigational equipment and dieselengine in order to meet its rigorous public rela-tions' commitments as much as to avoid thetempests and ice-bergs of the No rth Atlantic —Firstbrook's text is all too able to navigate astraight course of historical convenience. Whilethis attractive edition will undoubtedly entice awide readership, it is unfortunate that it does notdo more to bring its popular audience to a clearerunderstanding of the past.

David G. SylvesterLangley, British Columbia

Cabot The Discovery of a New World. St. John's,NF: Media Touch, 1997 [P.O. Box 1592, St.John's, NF A1C 5P3; http://www.meditouch.corn]. CD-ROM text, images, and music. Mini-mum requirements: IBM PC or compatible,486DX-33, CD-ROM, 8 Mb RAM, 256 colours,8-bit sound card, Windows 3.1. Recommendedset-up: Pentium 66 or higher, 4X CD-ROM, 16Mb RAM, 16-bit colour or higher, Windows 95.$39.95, retail version; $79.95, educational ver-sion (includes study modules and Teacher'sManual).

The box of this CD-ROM boasts that it containsover 300 screens of information, graphics andinteractivity. The CD also includes some "CabotGames." Installation is relatively easy and can bedone under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. It runsfairly quickly on any PC including 486s and doesnot necessitate a high resolution.

Relying heavily on graphics, the main pro-gram contains information presented in byte-sizedamounts. One can learn a little about Cabot's life,his voyages, and the Matthew. Yet this is the onlywell-developed section to include a video session(of questions and answers with Dr. Peter Pope).The section on "Navigation and Exploration"contains brief biographies of four explorers and amap gallery, but the latter is somewhat disap-pointing since it only contains stylized low-resolution sketches, outlines or misidentifiedmaps. The picture of what is supposed to be theJuan de la Cosa map, for instance, is a photographof the 1860 Jomard Copy. The closeup is a roughsketch based on Harrisse's outline and includeshis mistakes (Harrisse thought a hole in the map'sleather was an island). The reference section, withmany short text files that can be searched, printedor saved, is well written and contains a largeamount of information on Cabot and his era.

This multimedia attempt at creating a CabotCD-ROM is an interesting project at best. I mustadmit, however, that the overall presentation canbe disconcerting, and one can easily get lost. Likemany other CDs, this one does not respecthuman-interface guidelines and imposes its ownpeculiar logic and navigational structure. Forinstance, the main program does not minimize,nor does it show up in the task bar. Once one hasspent some time figuring out these specifics,usage is relatively easy.


The purpose of this CD-ROM is to makewhat little information there is on the Cabotvoyages accessible to a wide, varied, but un-specialised audience. It certainly is not a refer-ence work for scholars, nor is it a useful tool forserious history buffs. Nevertheless the Cabot CD-ROM is an interesting attempt at making historycome alive, and should prove popular with stu-dents. Teachers will appreciate the multi-disci-plinary approach because it gives young historystudents a better grasp of the subject matterthrough tangible and practical information.

The games are the single greatest disap-pointment, for they seem at times to be a crossbetween a Cabotian pacman game and an artifi-cial intelligence program. Their purpose is notalways clear, nor is it intuitive. One could sup-pose they were added to make the subject mattermore palatable to a younger audience, but I amnot convinced that it will be a success since itdoes not measure up to commercial simulationgames in complexity or attractiveness.

Marc CormierToronto, Ontario

Jacob M. Price. The Atlantic Frontier of theThirteen American Colonies and States: Essays inEighteenth Century Commercial and SocialHistory. Collected Studies Series; Aldershot,Hamps. & Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996. xii +270 pp., tables, index. US $79.95, cloth; ISBN 0-86078-586-6

There has never been a finer economic historianof colonial America than Jacob Price. His com-mand of economic theory has always been rigor-ous but lucid; his research has been exhaustiveyet broad; and the questions he has posed havebeen precise but never petty. He has piecedtogether the story of business ventures, submittedbroad hypotheses to quantitative tests, carried hisanalysis across international boundaries, and dealtin a wide variety of problems with a virtuositythat has left most of his historical generation inawe. For practical reasons, most early modernhistorians have chosen to focus on limited re-gions, periods, and branches of business. Pricehas always seemed to operate like a team —researching large collections, mastering severalnational histories, and covering spans of time that

would challenge most other scholars.The Atlantic Frontier is a collection of seven

of Price's previously published a rticles. All dealwith the American colonies and their place withinthe seventeenth- and eighteenth-century No rthAtlantic economy. The first is a wide-rangingpiece on "The Transatlantic Economy" that as-sesses the merits of different models for under-standing the economic history of early No rthAmerica. This is followed by a remarkable com-parative study of colonial seaports, which offersa persuasive argument for why ce rtain townsdeveloped while others did not. Two rather moretechnical papers extend our knowledge of thegross value of the transatlantic trade betweenGreat Britain and the colonies back to 1740 andmeasure the export value of colonial shipping atthe eve of the American Revolution. The financ-ing of the slave trade and of the plantation econo-mies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesis treated in Chapter Five, and the question of"Who Cared about the Colonies" during the half-century leading up to the Revolution is analyzedquantitatively in Chapter Six. The final piece is adetailed study of public finance in Mary land,which traces the post-revolutionary attempts ofthe state to claim the assets it had deposited in theBank of England during the colonial period.

Although none of the articles are particularlyhard to find in their originally published form, thecumulative effect of reading them at once is toremind us that the economic life of early modernNorth American colonies might "face east" [ix] aswell as west. American historians' obsession withwestward expansion makes some sense in thestudy of the country's history after 1783, butsurely Price is right that before 1775 colonialbusinessmen worried much more about credit,market conditions, and politics in the Old Worldacross the sea than in the New World across theAppalachians. The great strength of Price's workhas been to recognize that the full resolution tomost historical problems in which the colonialmerchants were involved requires conceptualizingthem in transatlantic terms and researching theiranswers in archives both in Europe and America.Early modern merchants thought internationally,and Jacob Price "thinks like a merchant."

Daniel VickersSt. John's, Newfoundland

Book Reviews 95

Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (eds.).European Migrants: Global and Local Perspec-tives. Boston: Northeastern Universi ty Press,1996. vii + 329 pp., tables, figures, chapter notes,select bibliography, index. US $47.50, cloth;ISBN 1-55553-242-X; US $16.95, paper; ISBN1-55553-243-8.

The title offers no adequate indication of the aimand content of the ten essays assembled in thisvolume. Most of the essays are not confined toEuropean migrations per se but concern nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century mass migra-tions to the Americas. Some attention is also paidto Asia, Australia, and Africa. The aim of theeditors is to promote the globalization of migra-tion studies, that is, "to perceive internationalmobility as part of a world system in which labormoves among dependent peripheries and domi-nant cores." [4] In other words, individual deci-sions to migrate ought to be viewed within aframework of long-range, global, socio-economic,and gender patterns. Indeed, in some of theessays, European migrants appear incidental tothe aim of directing migration studies towards theidentification of systems and structures linkinglocal and global levels.

The book is divided into three parts —"Migration Systems," "Leaving Home," and"Approaches to Acculturation." Dirk Hoerder setsthe agenda in the first pa rt with a sweeping sur-vey of changing networks of interconnectedmigration systems in the Atlantic economies fromthe thirteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Hisreal concern is with labor migrations anywhere asa function of colonial and imperialist economicsystems. In an essay first published in 1989, J.Jackson and Leslie Page Moch recommend aninterdisciplinary systems approach to the issuesconnecting migration with European industrial-ization and urbanization. Walter Nugent suggestssystemic linkages between European population,labor, and land structures on the one hand and sexratios, numbers, and destinations of Europeanmigrants worldwide on the other hand. DonnaGabaccia's objective is to trace the transitionsamong America's immigrants from female minor-ity to female majority. She looks at the entiregender spectrum of American arrivals in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Part II, "Leaving Home," consists of contri-

butions on topics ranging from European familial,landholding, and labor systems as determinants ofmigration patterns to labor migrations of Germansand Poles in the nineteenth century. Most impres-sive is Steve Hochstadt's meticulous documenta-tion of how socio-economic changes in rural andurban Germany triggered the need to migrate toseek work. Testing the framework of a global sys-tem/dependency model, Ewa Morawska reexam-ines labor migrations from partitioned Poland towestern Europe — mostly Germany — and theUnited States as part of the circular exchange ofcapital and labor within the expanding Atlanticworld economic system. Defining migrations any-time anywhere as pa rt of the redistribution of thelabor force, Moch views migrations as embeddedin the family, landholding, and production sys-tems. She looks for links between temporaryEuropean migrations before 1914 and patterns ofpermanent relocation in Europe and overseas in aworld of proliferating migration systems.

Part Ill opens with an encyclopedic survey-type model of factors conditioning the accultura-tion of migrants as an ongoing process in coun-tries of origin and destination by Hoerder. Heargues that acculturation is structured by suchfactors as the destination economy, society, andpolitical system. The next two essays apply thisargument in case studies. In what she calls "diver-gent analysis," Nancy Green compares the differ-ent adaptations of eastern European Jewish mig-rants in New York, London, and Paris. The bookconcludes with Samuel Baily's application of asimilar comparative analysis, originally publishedin 1983, to the differential adjustment of Italianimmigrants in New York and Buenos Aires,1870-1914.

Ironically, it is not the essays arguing themethodological advantages of systems perspec-tives that yield the most convincing findings butthe clearly defined historical case studies byHochstadt, Morawska, Green, and Baily. Indeed,it is sometimes difficult to share the optimism ofthe editors that the systems approach can solve allproblems in migration studies. Moch's denial thatthe perspective of labor migration and accultura-tion as collective processes relegates individualmigrants to the role of "helpless automatons" islike trying to square a circle. Questionable arealso claims that this book contains the first com-pelling critique of migration as a function of


modernization, that it brought to light the exis-tence of pre-industrial migration systems, and thatpermanent settlement was a minority phenome-non for Europeans who moved to the new worldsbetween 1840 and 1914.

All in all, this collection of essays combinesprovocative perspectives with some impressiveresearch. The essays demonstrate that migrationis a complex process. They deserve a place in thescholarly debates to come.

Gerhard P. BasslerSt. John's, Newfoundland

Peter Allington and Basil Greenhill. The FirstAtlantic Liners: Seamanship in the Age of PaddleWheel, Sail and Screw. London: Conway Mari-time Press, 1997. vii +167 pp., photographs,illustrations, figures, maps, bibliography, index.£35, cloth; ISBN 0-85177-668-X. Canadian dis-tributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, ON.

This is, quite simply, an extraordinary work —wholly embracing yet far surpassing what bothmain title and subtitle promise. Combining theremarkable professional competencies of a distin-guished maritime historian, noted for his exper-tise in the nineteenth-century transition from sailto steam, with those of a master mariner withyears of experience in all aspects of sail hasresulted in a meticulous, wide-ranging, andimpressively authoritative consideration of de-sign, construction, and operation of those earlyvessels that were intended for oceanic voyagingunder both sail and steam power.

Director of England's National MaritimeMuseum for many years, Basil Greenhill has writ-ten extensively in nineteenth-century maritimesubjects, his most recent related work being astudy, with Ann Giffard, of Steam, Politics, andPatronage: The Transformation of the RoyalNavy, 1815-1854 (1994), preceded by his exten-sive contributions to The Advent of Steam: TheMerchant Steamship Before 1900 (1993). Hisown rich collection of contemporary photographs,upon which he has drawn extensively for TheFirst Atlantic Liners, is complemented by PeterAllington's clear and abundant diagrams; thereare also numerous contemporary paintings andphotographs from other sources for which theauthors provide informative captions that call the

reader's attention to detailed matters of vessel andmachinery design as well as intricate problems inrigging vessels that operated under sail and steam,whether together or separately.

The text, at times daunting for all but theexpert sailor, goes into formidable detail aboutmatters of rigging and sail handling, so that not-withstanding the helpful and abundant diagramsand other illustrative material, the casual readermay find this work too much of a good thing. Ofcourse, the detailed discussions of paddlewheels,engines, boilers, and vessel hulls may be compar-ably intimidating to others; in any case, much ofthe authoritative quality of this book rests on thecopious use of contemporary technical discus-sions through which the authors effectively est-ablish the historical context of their subject, withall the confusion and disagreement that swirledabout such striking innovation in the maritimeworld.

The one early oceangoing steamer thatprovides the focus for the book is the quite suc-cessful Great Western, the paddlewheeler that,along with the much smaller Sirius, proved in1838 the feasibility of transatlantic steam travelby steaming from the British Isles to New York.Through a meticulous analysis of that vessel's logentries the authors present the considerableproblems of a sail-assisted paddle steamship atsea, and by useful comparisons with other steam-ships of the era, notably the iron-hulled, screw-propelled Great Britain (1843), they clearlyestablish their argument for the operational andeconomic limitations of the steam paddlewheeleras a viable form of seagoing commercial enter-prise. This point, in fact, is central to their assess-ment of early oceangoing steam; one may hopethat other maritime scholars will answer theirfinal questions as to what motivated investors andentrepreneurs who embarked on such risky ven-tures from the 1830s through the 1850s, espe-cially before the compound reciprocating steamengine made marine steam propulsion at leastcomparative with sail.

In a magisterial work such as this therealways will be quibbles over what was left out orreceived less (or more) emphasis than one wouldprefer. For example, the discussion of boilerdesign [58-59] makes a proper distinction be-tween "flue" and "tubular" boilers, but treats bothdesigns in terms of hot gases from the furnace

Book Reviews 97

heating the surrounding water in order to producesteam. What is omitted here is the "watertube"boiler design, so popular in naval circles in the1850s and thereafter, where the water flowsthrough tubes that are surrounded by the hotgases. Some readers also might like more of acomparative study of British and Americansteamship designs than is evident here, whereAmerican naval vessels receive only an occa-sional mention, and American merchant steamershardly appear at all in any of the discussion. This,after all, was a period of intense examination ofsteam propulsion experiments on both sides of theAtlantic, as the perusal of contemporary newspa-pers and scientific periodicals will quickly reveal.

Quibbles aside, The First Atlantic Liners isa splendid accomplishment. Henceforth, noaccount of oceangoing maritime enterprise duringthis era can afford to ignore this work; any exami-nation of seagoing steam will be enriched by con-sulting, and even pondering, its contents.

Edward W. SloanFarmington, Connecticut

W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Mayer (eds.). Glas-gow, Volume 11: 1830 to 1912. Manchester andNew York: M anchester Universi ty Press, 1996. xi+ 532 pp., tables, figures„ maps, photographs,chapter notes. US $89.95, cloth; ISBN 0-7190-3692-5. Distributed in No rth America by St.Martin's Press, New York, NY.

This is the second substantial volume of the newthree-volume history of Glasgow (the first vol-ume, edited by T. M. Devine and G. Jackson, wasreviewed by David Starkey in the July 1996 issueof TNM/LMN, pp. 55-56) and covers the period inwhich the city rose to become the Second City ofthe British Empire. It is more a work of urbanthan of maritime history, but since it makes high— and justifiable — claims for Glasgow as a po rtand a centre of trade and industry it seems reason-able to review it in that light.

The production of such a work is a mostdifficult task: for any one scholar to master thesources and the techniques to cover all aspects ofsuch a story would take a lifetime or more, andresearch grants do not last that long. Yet to com-pile a multi-author work involves problems ofachieving continuity and completeness while

avoiding duplication. This volume contains anintroduction and thirteen contributions which maybe grouped as construction, trade and industry;demographics; the social problems which Glas-gow suffered and finally their part ial solution byan extraordinary degree of municipalisation. Butlocal patriotism is sometimes a little too evident:Liverpudlians' life expectancy in the 1840s waseven lower than Glaswegians' and Liverpool'smunicipal investment in addressing the problemwas larger, earlier and proportionately moresuccessful. This may have resulted partly fromthe Scottish Poor Law, which was surely devisedto encourage racist English jokes about Scots'meanness.

This may be thought a reviewer's personalfoible, but the book contains much about engi-neering, as it should when treating one of theworld's great engineering manufacturing centres.It has, however, almost nothing about profes-sional engineers or their work. Whatever did themembers of the Institution of Shipbuilding &Engineering in Scotland talk about at their meet-ings? Did Rankine's professed aim of unitingtheoretical and practical engineering contribute tothe success of local marine engine builders? Howimportant was the Denny Tank in turning hulldesign from craft into science, and in the phe-nomenal success of Clydeside shipbuilding? Notonly do we not get the answers, but we even findthe term "engineer" misused to mean "engineeringproduction worker." This is sad, because Gl asgowmade a great contribution to professional engi-neering.

Readers of this journal will obviously bemost interested in the sections "Trade, Commerceand Finance" by Gordon Jackson and CharlesMunn and "The Industries of Glasgow" by JohnButt . Both are excellent pieces, though Butt morethan once refers to hydraulic presses of 12,000 orso tons capacity, and at times it seemed that justsuch a tool had been used to make these twocontributions fit into the allotted space. Togetherthey number under ninety pages, which seemsrather to underplay the principal sources of thewealth of the city.

This would be perfectly understandable ifthere were genuine pressure on space, but pre-sumably there was not, as some elements in theother contributions are repeated. The appallingliving conditions of the poor are described at


varying length in sections 4, 9,10 and 11, temper-ance makes several appearances and even theexcessive softness of Loch Katrine water for safedelivery through lead pipes appears twice. Nowthat references re-number automatically it wouldhave been a simple matter to replace the repeti-tions with cross-references. That, after all, is whatone does with a monograph when repetitions arediscovered in different chapters written a yearapart .

The book is well printed and bound as a first-stop reference book whose usefulness will lastmany years should be. Reproduction of the platesis less good, but they are perfectly intelligible forthe purposes for which they are included. Non-Glaswegians would probably appreciate a fold-out map tipped into the back cover, but publishershate them. The referencing is generous, but a gen-eral bibliography would also have been useful.

That is a considerable list of gripes, andconveys an unduly bleak impression. This bookpresents the results of a phenomenal amount ofresearch conducted over many years, and consti-tutes the fullest and clearest picture yet availableof any British po rt city in this extremely complexperiod. Underlying it are databases which pro-mise further additions to knowledge not just ofGlasgow itself but of all the multifarious thingswhich happened in it. Coming from a city whosehistorical problems are very similar to Glasgow'sand whose history is just as complex, I only wishthat such a work were available here. It is notperfect, and when scholars in Liverpool andelsewhere tackle the task they may do thingsdifferently, but they will certainly look closely atthis history of Britain's Second (and don't youforget it) City .

Adrian JarvisLiverpool, England

R.A. Cage. A Tramp Shipping Dynasty —Burrell& Son of Glasgow, 1850-1939. A History ofOwnership, Finance, and Profit. Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1997. x + 213 pp., appendices,bibliography, index. US $69.50, cloth; ISBN 0-313-30346-0.

This is an unusual and unsatisfying book. It isunusual in that its appendices exceed its text bymore than four times and it is unsatisfying in that

it leaves totally unanswered a range of questionsrelevant to tramp shipping. It claims to have threeobjectives, namely, to present "the most compre-hensive database of tramp shipping," to give adetailed history of Burrell & Son, one of thelargest British tramp ship owners, and finally todemonstrate the value of material in public ar-chives. How far does it succeed?

The first objective is not hard to achieve, inthat very little has been written on the history oroperation of a particular tramp shipping firm orthe industry as a whole. This remains one of thegreat under-researched areas in maritime history,unlike the large liner firms. Thus Cage's immenseappendix stretching to about 170 pages should behighly welcomed. However the appendices are ofa particular kind. They list the ships owned andmanaged by Burrell and give a breakdown oftechnical data on dimensions, hull materials,engine or rig type, and details of ownership, thatis the various shareholders and how they alteredover time. The largest single appendix is vaguelyreminiscent of the fleet lists drawn up in the UKby the World Ship Society combined with tran-scriptions of the ship registers. It is a usefulsource but would be even more accessible if itwere available in an electronic form, about whichthe author makes no mention. There is also a listof all the puffers built by Burrells at their Hamil-ton Hill shipyard between 1875 and 1898 withdetails of construction and ownership, which willdelight puffer fans everywhere.

The "detailed history" of Burrells deals onlywith ship construction, finance and ownership:important areas in their own right, but sadlysaying nothing on operations. The author's expla-nation of this lacuna is that none of the internalrecords of the firm have survived and hencevirtually nothing can be said about this. Yet sincehe has the names and registered numbers of theships managed by Burrell it would have beenrelatively easy to access the crew agreements;these would at least have provided details ofroutes worked, crews, and possibly cargoes. IfCage's intent was to demonstrate the value ofmaterial in public archives, then this was not nec-essary, as it is not in dispute. In any case, in thefinal analysis, the result is what can only bedescribed as a very one-sided study.

What is indisputable about the Burrells isthat they made a vast amount of money when

Book Reviews 99

they sold their fleet during World War I. Therewas no secret in explaining this, since shipswhich they had bought pre-war for between£40,000 to £42,000 each were sold for about£ 145,000 each. As about two dozen ships wereinvolved the capital gain was enormous. What ismore uncertain, and more intriguing, is howprofitable Burrells were in operating their fleet.Cage is convinced there were lucrative returns.This is based on the indirect evidence of mort-gages being repaid, particularly between 1885and 1899. However this could be explained bythe Burrells increasing the equity base of theircompanies by bringing in more outsideshareholding. He does not discuss this. Neverthe-less, if it was a profitable operation how doesCage explain this, particularly in a period ofrelatively depressed freight rates?

He offers five factors, though without ex-plicit prioritisation or weighting: the routesworked in Asia and the Pacific being lesscompetitive than elsewhere; a new, modern andtherefore efficient fleet; an excellent network ofagents; standard ship design allowing closeoperational scrutiny; and the use of cheap Chi-nese labour. Sadly there is no evidence or argu-ment to back up most of these points. No evi-dence of the routes worked is presented, nor anyevidence of or arguments why these should belacking in competition. He does not demonstratehow far or why a modern fleet was more produc-tive, though it seems intuitively likely. Someexplanation of why and how their network ofagents was superior to that of others would havebeen welcomed given recent work on networktheory and agent and principal theory, but nothingis offered. Expansion of the Burrells methods ofmonitoring and control would have been valuablegiven current interest in management techniques,springing largely from Chandler's work, but noexplanation is forthcoming. There is no discus-sion of how much cheaper were Asiatic crewsthan European, or what propo rtion of total costswere made up by labour costs, and thus howsignificant this feature was. This is just oneexample of how this book fails to address impor-tant questions. Overall it seems a missed oppor-tunity.

John ArmstrongEaling, London

Dag Bakka, Jr.. Shipping through the Ages: LeifHöegh and Co., 1927-1997. Oslo: Leif Höeghand Co., 1997 [order from: the Norsk

Sjørfartsmuseum, Bygdøynesveien37, N-0286 Oslo 2,Norway]. 304 pp., photographs, illustrations,figures, fleet list, index, select bibliography. NOK300, cloth; ISBN 82-91258-07-4.

There is a tradition in Scandinavia to commemor-ate impo rtant business anniversaries by sponsor-ing a history of the firm in question. Shippingthrough the Ages is such a book, commissionedto celebrate the centenary of the birth of LeifHöegh, the founder, and the seventieth anniver-sary of his firm. As readers will immediatelyappreciate, there are inherent problems in suchprojects, not least the obvious conflict of interest,which even the most hands-off approach cannever completely conquer. Nonetheless, thetradition makes Scandinavian shipping firms thebest documented in the world, if not always thebest analyzed.

Dag Bakka, Jr., is a veteran of this type ofendeavour, having written previous volumes onWilh. Wilhelmsen and Helmer Staubo and Co.,among others. And, on one level at least, he isone of the best. Bakka is a supremely giftednarrative historian who tells often complex storieswell. He also understands the shipping businesssuperficially, which is to say that he is good onthe ships and open to suggestions about thedecision-making rationales. The result in this caseis a book that is meticulous in all the trivialdetails and unlikely to offend any of the firm's"friends" with controversial analyses. This, ofcourse, is just what the company is paying for.

Leif Höegh clearly paid well. While I haveno idea how Bakka was compensated for hisefforts, Höegh spared no expense when it came toproducing the volume. Indeed, it is one of thehandsomest of this genre that I have seen. Thereare a plethora of photographs, many in colour andfewer than might be expected of the vanity vari-ety. The graphics enhance the text and are excep-tionally well done.

But if this is a handsome book that likelysatisfied the firm, what about readers and review-ers? Here the results are more mixed. For thosewho like ship lists, this study contains one of thebest-documented that I have seen. On the otherhand, the biggest failing, as might be expected, is


in the analysis. Take the shipping crisis of the1970s and early 1980s as an example. We knowthat Höegh weathered this era well, despite thedeath of the founder just as the downturn began.One of the things I most looked forward to was anexplanation of how the firm managed to do thiswhile more visible Norwegian shipowners, suchas Reksten, eventually went bankrupt. The ans-wer, according to Bakka, is that the firm managedto combine "wet" and "d ry " cargoes and therebyachieved a much higher utilization than manyother firms. As well, the company had a numberof guaranteed and quite lucrative t anker contracts,which helped to carry it into 1976. The problemswith these types of argument are two-fold. First,nowhere does Bakka demonstrate that this balanc-ing act occurred, let alone that Höegh performedit any better than its competitors; and second,while many large Norwegian firms had similarlybalanced fleets (Reksten was unusual in his totalreliance on tankers) and long-term contracts withoil companies, most did much less well. In sho rt ,the explanation is asserted rather than proved.

Even worse is the discussion of the lastfifteen years, where there is almost no analysis atall. While I accept that it would have been diffi-cult to get very much historical perspective,Bakka seems content merely to repeat what thefirm's executives told him. Or at least this is whatI would surmise from reading the book, since oneof the glaring weaknesses is the total absence ofnotes or citations. To be charitable, I expect thatthis is because the sources were internal to thefirm and hence would not be available to theaverage reader. My response is that this is pre-cisely why we need references in this type ofbook, so that the reader has some way of evaluat-ing the credibility of the sources. Bakka andHöegh have let us down in this respect.

On balance, however, I think this is a usefulbook, albeit one that has to be used with a gooddeal of caution. Certainly the skeleton of LeifHöegh and Co. is laid out for shipping historians.What we need now is for an independent scholarto put some flesh on the bones and some soul inits innards. This impo rtant Norwegian shippingfirm deserves such a treatment.

Lewis R. FischerSt. John's, Newfoundland

Okechukwu C. Iheduru. The Political Economy ofInternational Shipping in Developing Countries.Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 300pp., figures, tables, appendices, notes, references,index. US $39.50, cloth; ISBN 0-87413-552-4.

This is an important addition to the considerableliterature on the attempts by the developingcountries to secure a New International EconomicOrder (NIEO). First, it is one of the few majorstudies on shipping in the context of the politicaleconomy of North-South relations, and the firstscholarly study of West and Central Africa.Second, by adopting an "eclectic" approach, [32]based essentially on Alexander Gerschenkron'slate industrialization theory, the author has chal-lenged mainstream political economy. Third, thecollection of data, reflected in the range ofsources, is impressive, if not intimidating; theanalysis is sophisticated, and the language read-able but not pedestrian. The author takes pains toexplain or define his concepts.

The book deals with the background to, andreasons for the failure of, the New InternationalMaritime Order (NIMO), an attempt by theDeveloping Maritime Nations (DMNs) to breakthe stranglehold of the Traditional MaritimeNations (TMNs) of Europe, No rth America andJapan on their shipping trade. Buoyed up by the1974 UN Code for Liner Shipping, these nationsembarked on "maritime nationalism" and "mari-time regionalism" to achieve the NIMO. By themid-1980s, all their efforts had been thwarted byvarious factors which are exhaustively analyzedin this book.

Dr. Iheduru convincingly demonstrates theinadequacy of existing explanations for the failureof the NIMO: the "Recalcitrant Rich North"argument; the lack of unity among the DMNs;and the "badly flawed bargaining tactics andstrategy" of advocates of NIEO and NIMO. Theyare, he argues, "at best, statements of fact...but[they] fall sho rt of theory-building, particularlybecause different writers emphasize differentvariables." [29] His approach is to "examine allthe relevant variables simultaneously,...[and toensure] that the systemic, regional, national andindividual levels of analysis are given adequateprominence." [32]

The book has seven chapters. The firstsituates the study in the global context, reviews

Book Reviews 101

the relevant literature, and provides a theoreticalframework and justi fication for the study. Thenext three chapters focus on the dimensions of thestructure of the global and regional shippingtrades, and on local and inte rnational efforts toachieve NIMO. Inter-regional maritime competi-tion, which undid the maritime regionalism thatthe states of the West and Central Africa regionespoused, is critically examined in chapter 5,while the domestic contexts of maritime policies,which complement the external or internationaldimension of the problem, are discussedexhaustively in the sixth chapter. Chapter 7summarizes and concludes the work with reflec-tions on the political economy of North-Southrelations and merchant fleet development.

This book clearly demonstrates the utterfailure of the quest for NIMO, leading to a wor-sening of maritime dependency. This is attributedto a combination of "the technological changes inworld shipping, the distribution of structuralpower in the world shipping industry, competingnationalism's among the developing maritimenations, and the state-society interactions in-volved in the formulation and implementation ofthe various shipping policies in the DMNs." [78]Significantly, the study compares the failure ofthis region with the success of Southeast Asia.The critical difference, it is argued, is that whileSouth Korea and Singapore employed virtuallythe same strategies to foster a "nurture capita-lism," the Africans "used state inte rvention toengage in personal accumulation and patronagepolitics," even discouraging the emergence of anindigenous merchant class of capitalists whichmight later threaten the political order! [220]Thus, while the author deprecates monocausalexplanations, he emphasises internal initiative. Herecommends that the government should redirectits efforts to facilitate "the emergence of genuinenational capitalism for this is the name of thegame as far as shipping is concerned." [238] Hispanacea of a "good mix between economic na-tionalism and market capitalism, like those prac-ticed in Southeast Asia" is further acknowledgedas "an admission of the importance of the role ofagency in overcoming, or, at least, ameliorating,structural impediments to the developing coun-tries' part icipation in the world economy." [240]

However, it appears that the author is notbothered by the political cost of creating indige-

nous capitalism, as is evident in South Korea.Second, it is surprising that no reference is madeto French neo-colonialism, a real stumbling blockto meaningful regional co-operation in WestAfr ica. Then there are the inevitable errors. Theinference from Table 2-2 [71] regarding the worldaverage ought to be nine and not six percent.Table 4-2 [129] covers the period 1974-94 where-as the sources are 1986 publications. A number ofsources cited in the text (e.g. Puchala, 1992[150]) have no entry in the references. Spellingmistakes occur, mainly in the references.

Nevertheless, on the whole, this book fills acritical gap in the literature and shall remain forlong an important reference text. The rich collec-tion of data, the depth of analysis and an appeal todiverse disciplines make it a highly recommendedtext in the field of maritime studies.

Ayodeji OlukojuLagos, Nigeria

Michael North. From the North Sea to the Baltic:Essays in Commercial Monetary and AgrarianHistory, 1500-1800. Collected Studies Series;Aldershot, Hamps. & Brookfield, VT: Variorum,1 996. xxii + 278 pp., maps, tables, illustrations,index. US $89.95, cloth; ISBN 0-86078-600-5.

Now and then some productive and creativehistorians are invited to put their various papers,articles, essays, lectures and so on together for acompilation of their intellectual effo rts. Indeed, iftheir work is of good quality and if the productsof their scientific striving are published in ob-scure, hard to find journals or proceedings thathave an action radius confined to the number ofparticipants, the reader will be utterly pleased tohave all the art icles at hand in just one volume.Michael North, known to most of us as an expe rton maritime, economic (or commercial andmonetary), and agrarian history, was presentedthe opportunity to publish a selection of hisarticles in such a volume. And of course thedistinguished historian accepted the invitation,and carefully selected nineteen essays on varyingtopics that all had something to do with thehistory of the Baltic and North Sea.

The contents of the collection vary fromtrade to and from the Baltic and the decline of theDutch economy in the eighteenth century, to the


European rice trade, from Geldumlauf in Prussiato banking and credit in Northern Germany. Thisis a very wide range of subjects indeed. Most ofthe articles were published in Festschrifte, somein well-respected journals such as the Journal ofEuropean Economic History. For those hesitatingto purchase this pièce de résistance because of itsprice, in favour of sticking to the old and fumbledxeroxes, the advertisement that three essays arepublished in English for the first time must takeaway all doubts. Who on earth wants to miss anarticle on "the export of timber and timber by-products," "Hamburg as the most English city"and "wage labour versus corvée labour"?

Yet the enthusiastic reader who is eager tolearn about these premières will soon develop afeeling of déjà-vu, having already seen the "try-outs." For instance, the article on the export oftimber is more or less identical to another articlepublished in Yrjö Kaukiainen (ed.), The Baltic asa Trade Road (Kotka, 1989), an article, more-over, to which reference is made in footnote 2.The article also shows some slight resemblancewith his "Waldwarenhandel und -Produktion" inJ.M. van Winter (ed.), The Interactions of Am-sterdam and Antwerp with the Baltic Region(Leiden, 1983). The art icle presents an overviewof the export of timber to Western Europe. Thattimber was exported in large quantities to West-ern Europe, in particular to the Netherlands, isobvious. Whether this trade was profitable is, onthe other hand, a more difficult question to ans-wer because the proof is not only poor but, moreimportantly, is also atypical. The rates of profit-ability during the first Anglo-Dutch war (1652-1654) cannot be used in general or even as indica-tions of a certain level of profitability. The Dutchnavy and Dutch merchant marine lost more thana thousand ships to the English. Wood becamescarce and precious to the Dutch.

The second article, first published in English,concerns Hamburg, the continent's most Englishcity (apart from Rotterdam, which was known as"Little London"). The article provides readerswith a good impression of what was imported andexported through the port of Hamburg on thebasis of various available statistical material, butit remains a mystery why the city was a mostEnglish city. A title such as "import and export ofHamburg in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies" would have been more appropriate.

These articles are characteristic of the othersin this book; all have, more or less, the same in-tellectual format — statistical data concerning thisor that trade accompanied by an explanation orinterpretation of the material. In fact, the a rticlesare a perfect example of old economic history.Nevertheless, some historians may find the col-lection useful. As for the way the collection ofpapers is presented, the cheapest solution wassought and found. The articles in their variousoriginal sty les and format have simply been pho-tocopied and assembled, without even being pro-vided with new pagination. Quite apart from theintellectual value of the papers by No rth, the onlyreal advantage of this volume is that it looksmuch better on your bookshelf and it takes lessroom than a pile of stained xeroxes.

Paul C. van RoyenAmsterdam, The Netherlands

Daniels Vickers (ed.). Marine Resources andHuman Societies in the North Atlantic Since1500: Papers Presented at the conference entitled"Marine Resources and Human Societies in theNorth Atlantic Since 1500," October 20-22,1995_. ISER Conference Paper Number 5; St.John's, NF: The Institute of Social and EconomicResearch, Memorial Universi ty of Newfoundland,1 997. vi + 473 pp., figures, maps, tables. $25,spiral-bound; ISSN 1997/02/100.

In the understanding of the resources of the No rthAtlantic and the societies dependent on them, thehard events of recent decades have prompted nota few reassessments. In Canada, and especially inNewfoundland, the near-euphoria which accom-panied the extension of the fisheries limit in 1977was in danger of being accompanied by an atti-tude that the big problems in the fisheries were athing of the past; but subsequent experience hasbeen traumatic rather than merely sobering. Thisvolume is praiseworthy in adding a valuablehistorical overview to the reassessments; arguablythe modern debate on resource management andresource allocation has paid inadequate attentionto past experience. While the conference onwhich the book is based was funded by Canadiansources and the book is from a Canadian perspec-tive, it also includes case studies from Iceland andNorway; and it also takes the liber ty under this

Book Reviews 103

title of including one useful parallel study fromBritish Columbia. The work is divided into fivesections: the first is the editor's introduction, andthe others are: fishing effort 1500-1996; tradi-tional ecological knowledge; marine propertyrights in history; and community, political econ-omy and fisheries policy. The impo rtance of thecod in the resources discussed is clear in that it iswritten into the titles of four of the papers, andfigures prominently in six of the others; andNewfoundland appropriately also is central to thestudy. While the objective is a review of a periodcovering half a millenium, the great pa rt of thediscussion focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries,when there is much more detailed information.

Although the degree of over-exploitation ofthe resource has been in the latest phase uniquelycatastrophic, the four papers in the second sectionmake it clear that the state of the stocks hasalways been a matter of concern for fishinginterests; and although the evidence is admittedlypartial there are indications that over-exploitationwas possible before the second half of the 20thcentury, at least at the local level. It becomesclear that there was fairly intense debate about thestate of fish stocks through the 19th century,although in a situation in which the major con-cerns were with the health of trade and the persis-tence of widespread poverty.

There is a challenging atmosphere about thetwo papers in the third section, which suggest thatmarine scientists have been prone to under-esti-mate traditional wisdom and lore in relation tofish stocks, and that m anagement systems need toacknowledge local differences and needs more.This also links with the opinion of Peter Pope inthe previous section that marine biologists haveseriously underestimated historical catches. Inthis section a joint paper by a marine scientist andtwo sociologists is the longest in the book: aswell as showing the continuing debate on how farthe cod is a "cosmopolitan vagrant" and how fara local inhabitant in the ocean, it also shows thetension which persisted between local communi-ties and government over gear and other innova-tions, which were officially encouraged as ameans to increase production and as remedy forinadequate incomes.

The fourth section of three papers dealingwith property rights focuses on a matter that hascome powerfully to the fore in the last twenty-

five years, with the general establishment ofnational fishing zones and the abandonment ofthe former general freedom of fishing. The paperby Dennis Clarke in this section is particularlytelling in its analysis of the dilemmas of fisheriesmanagement of Atlantic Canada in focussing onthe conflict between ITQ-based and community-based management — a conflict which reflects theopposition between economic efficiency andsocial needs. Also forceful for Atlantic Canada isthe paper by Philip Saunders, which points to theway in which developments in both internationaland national law were antithetical to both individ-ual and community claims to marine tenure.

The fifth section consists of four case studieswhich highlight various aspects of the situation,along with a thought-provoking analysis by SeanCadigan on the complexities of developments ofthe earlier part of the nineteenth century, whencapitalist interests and government policiescomplicated the debate on the ecological effectsof gear innovations.

The book is perhaps light on issues of fisher-ies policy, although these have been so muchdebated in other contexts that the concentrationon other issues can be justified. A main value ofthe work is that it is in effect a timely appeal notto forget the lessons of history, and to respect folkwisdom and community values which are indanger of being inadequately appreciated inanalysis based on systems and models.

James CoullAberdeen, Scotland

Irene Mart in. Legacy and Testament: The Story ofColumbia River Gillnetters. Pullman : WashingtonState Universi ty Press, 1994. xiv + 184 pp.,photographs, maps, illustrations, notes, glossary,bibliography, index. US $19.95, paper; ISBN 0-87422-109-9.

A freelance writer, historical researcher, andmember of a successful commercial fishingpartnership based in the State of Washington,Irene Mart in has produced a book that providesan affectionate and a well-researched, persona-lized look at a commercial fishery, technologicalinnovations and local adaptations, and a way oflife dear to the author's own heart. Legacy andTestament is a wonderfully detailed, unique


historical account of the lifeways of the commer-cial gillnetters of one of the historic centres ofNorth America's Pacific Northwest salmonfishery: the Columbia River. At the core of thestory Martin tells is the dri ft gillnet, the develop-ment of which in the la tter nineteenth centurydrove the commercial gillnet fishery and social-political organization of fishing people on theColumbia for a century. In dri ft gillnetting, fish-ers ply a tidal river, on either the incoming orreceding tide, with a wall of floating, weightednetting that entangles fish by their gills. Thistechnique was the major commercial salmon-fishing technique used along much of the PacificCoast.

Reflecting this emphasis on "the net thatcatches the fish" is Martin's explicit structuring ofthe book around the skills and decision-makingabilities of the individuals who created andoperated drift gillnets in specific locales. Theopening chapter on the local history of salmon-fishing gear is followed by chapters on the cast ofcharacters who innovated with drift gillnettingtechnology; on the "making" of net men; on thebusiness and technology of preparing the Colum-bia River bottom for "drifts"; and the skill, experi-ence, and social etiquette required to successfullyset drifts in a complex physical and legal environ-ment. Final chapters, on contemporary jurisdic-tional disputes and ethical issues in NorthwestCoast salmon fisheries, complete the picture. Herpersonal involvement in the fisheries is brieflyrelayed in the prologue and epilogue.

Irene Martin's connection to the salmonfishing industry is as interesting as the stories andphotographs in her book. Among other things,she has fished with her husband for severaldecades on the Columbia River, Willapa Bay, andBristol Bay, Alaska. I learned of her historicalresearch in 1989, when she contacted me aboutmy own research into Canada's Pacific Coast sal-mon fisheries. She had just completed a contractarchival research job sorting and inventorying theColumbia River Packers Association (BumbleBee Seafoods) Collection for the Columbia RiverMaritime Museum. "I am currently involved inwriting the script for a program and slide-tape onthis subject," she wrote, and "my long-termresearch plans involve a book on dri ft rights onthe Columbia, a form of territoriality amonggillnetters that has a long history..." She has

successfully realized these goals, and more, forshe recently published Beach of Heaven, A His-tory of Wahkiakum County (WSU Press, 1997).

In preparing Legacy and Testament theauthor employed oral interv iews dating back tothe 1950s, genealogies, industry and governmentpublications, fictional and non-fictional accounts,and archival records. While the narrative is oftenrambling and the essential involvement of NativeAmericans in the commercial salmon fisheries ofthe state conspicuously absent, the book's detailsof fishing techniques and the lives of individualfishers are extremely informative. The photo-graphs are exceptionally interesting, and theglossary, endnotes, and bibliography go farbeyond what one would normally expect of awork of local history. In sum, this is a highly-informative, thoughtful, local study of an impor-tant commercial fishery. Anyone with an interestin marine history would profit from reading it.

Dianne NewellVancouver, British Columbia

Leslie Leyland Fields. The Entangling Net:Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell TheirLives. Urbana and Chicago: Universi ty of IllinoisPress, 1997. ix + 156 pp., maps, photographs. US$34.95, cloth; ISBN 0-252-02220-3; US $16.95,paper; ISBN 0-252-06565-4.

The Entangling Net is an "insider" book. Theauthor began fishing when she married — know-ing that marriage into a fishing family wouldentail her own active involvement in the setgillnetting fishery on Kodiak island in Alaska.For eighteen years she worked alongside herhusband and other family members to catchPacific salmon as they came close inshore. Butstill she puzzled about why, in her words, "wom-en go to sea, choosing to live with three men in aspace often little bigger than a closet? Why dothey risk their lives, their health in this occupa-tion? Why do some leave children and spousesbehind, sacrificing the stability of the groundbeneath, the certainty of friendships and home?And not least, Was anyone's story like mine?"[7-8] And so she set out to explore her ownexperience as recorded in her journals, and theexperience of twenty-five other women active inthe Alaskan fishery, as recorded in interv iews the

Book Reviews 105

author conducted and transcribed.While the selection of the other women is as

serendipitous as such oral histories are apt to be— depending on the availability and willingnessof the women — Fields has managed to bringtogether a wide and representative range ofwomen of all ages and backgrounds and involvedin different kinds of fisheries, and in differentcapacities — as crews in small family boats, ascrew on larger boats and as skippers in their ownright. The author's own involvement in andknowledge of the fishery, together with herpassionate desire to answer her research questionhas granted her quite exceptional material. Clear-ly the women she interviewed could trust her, andthe result is thoughtful, detailed and honestdescriptions of their lives, their struggles andtriumphs and their own analysis.

Fields has combined her own writings andher later analysis of them with extracts from theinterv iews, grouped under broad topics. Thesetopics themselves represent a form of analysis,presenting what the author has decided are thekey components of a "career" in the Alaskanfishery. So the chapters deal with how the womengot into the fishery, the kind of work they did, thesexist att itudes and harassment they faced, theexperience of becoming a skipper, the dangersthey encountered and the factors that led womento stay in the fishery or to leave it. In each case,the reader is given some lively and fascinatingaccounts by the women, as well as the authorsown analysis and response to the material.

This is an enormously successful formulaand has resulted in one of the most satisfyingbooks of its kind. The author has been careful notto overload the text with technical details (al-though I would have welcomed further technicaldetails in an appendix). She has provided maps,although I found that some of the place names aremissing. She has also provided photographs ofnearly all the women interviewed in the book,mostly against fishing backgrounds, which pro-vide information in themselves.

I have one small criticism. The reader be-comes fascinated by the women as they appear inthe text, but because of the way in which the bookis arranged, one tends to lose the thread of parti-cular lives. It would be very useful to extend the"Notes on the Fishers" section to provide morethorough biographical detail. But this is a small

criticism of a sound and satisfying book that willmake a valuable addition to our gradually accu-mulating knowledge about women active in thefisheries of the world.

Marilyn Po rterSt. John's, Newfoundland

Ron Formisano. The Great Lobster War. Am-herst: Universi ty of Massachusetts Press, 1997.150 pp., maps, figures, photographs, index. US$35, cloth; ISBN 1-55849-052-3; US $14.95,paper; ISBN 1-55849-071-X.

The title is an ironic description of events in thesummers of 1956 and '57, when about fourthousand Maine lobster fishermen tied up theirboats, refusing to fish for the prices being offeredby wholesale dealers. The tie-ups, initiated andcoordinated by the Maine Lobsterman's Associa-tion (MLA), were not notably successful: in theend, the lobster catchers (we are informed by theauthor that this is the locally preferred term) wentback to work with no clear improvement inprices, which continued to be set by the dealers.

The leadership was meticulous about insist-ing that the MLA was an association, not a union,and the work stoppage was a tie-up and not astrike. Their reasons soon become clear. On theday the 1957 tie-up ended, officials of the USDepartment of Justice arrived in Maine and beganto interv iew lobstermen and dealers. Two monthslater, the Government of the United Statesbrought indictments against the MLA and itsleader for conspiracy to fix prices in "unreason-able restraint of...trade and commerce." [47]Similar indictments were brought against sevenwholesale lobster dealers in the Port land area.The charges were laid under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, passed by the US Congress in 1890 inan attempt to mitigate some of the excesses ofnineteenth-century monopolistic capitalism.

In the first two chapters of The Great LobsterWar, Ron Formisano sketches these events andbriefly locates them in the history of the lobsterfishery in Maine. Most of the rest of the book isdevoted to a step-by-step account of the trial,drawn from transcripts, newspaper files, andconversations with surviving pa rticipants. It is aserious story but, as the author himself says, it isalso "a drama of charm, humor and irony," [4]


and he tells it well. Clear and concise descriptionsof people and places make the narrative lively andimmediate; capsule biographies and brief histori-cal sketches locate the events in a larger context.

The lobstermen's trial ended in incongruouscheerfulness. The jury found them guilty and thejudge imposed nominal fines which he immedi-ately remitted. Defendants and prosecution teamexchanged smiles, handshakes, jokes and compli-ments. Later, the dealers were also found guiltyand given nominal fines which they, unlike thefishermen, were required to pay. But there is nodoubt about who won the war. A permanentinjunction was issued prohibiting the MLA fromengaging in work stoppages and efforts to estab-lish prices. No such injunction was broughtagainst the dealers.

The story is very local, but the conflicts arepretty well archetypical in modern industrialsocieties: capital vs. worker, government vs.citizen, urban vs. rural, individualism vs. collect-ivism, law vs. justice. The book will be of interestto people with connections to the Maine coast,and to those looking for comparisons with otherexamples of resistance among small commodityproducers. I doubt, however, that it leaves us withmuch in the way of lessons for the future. In anEpilogue, Formisano paints a depressingly pre-dictable picture of developments over the fortyyears since the trial: mechanization, massiveincreases in fishing effo rt , ineffectual conserva-tion lobbies, and unbridled competition on thelobster fishing grounds, with trap-buoys beingcut, boats rammed, and guns brandished.

For some readers, though, the book mayprovide another so rt of insight. In the Introduc-tion, the author says that the story he is about totell is "about a group whose values are bothstrongly and explicitly individualist, yet deeply,but implicitly, cooperative and communal." [4]This is a contradiction that I, as a neighbour, havelong noticed and puzzled over as being pervasivein US fiction and popular culture generally. Thisbook has not explained the paradox for me, butperhaps that is because Formisano attributes theseconflicting values narrowly to his lobstermen:their story may be more generically Americanthan he thinks.

Gordon InglisSt. John's, Newfoundland

Sebastian Junger. The Perfect Storm: A TrueStory of Men Against the Sea. New York &London: W.W. No rton & Company, 1997. xii +227 pp., map. US $23.95, Cdn $29.99, cloth;ISBN 0-393-04016-X.

Underlying the wealth produced by the fisheriesand behind all of the statistics of catches, thestudies of fish biology and the rest of thecity-dwellers understanding of commercial fish-ing lies an awful truth: deepwater fisheries kill ahigher percentage of their workforce than do anyother industries. In this remarkable book, Sebas-tian Junger approaches this horrific subjectthrough an account of the Gloucester swordfishlongliner Andrea Gail, which disappeared with-out trace somewhere off Sable Island during the"Storm of the Century" in October 1991. Jungerchooses to be absolutely factual (to the extent ofusing one format for comments he recorded afterthe event and another for remembered dialoguereported to him) and this gives his book a starkand brutal reality. Since nothing is known of whatreally happened to the Andrea Gail, however, therefusal to invent detail makes her story, and thatof the six men who died with her, too sho rt to dothem justice. Junger thus fills it out with accountsof other people caught in that same fearful storm,of the widows and children left behind, of con-tainer ships damaged, yachts abandoned and ahelicopter lost while returning from a rescuemission. The Gold Bond Conveyor makes anappearance, standing by a yacht while haulinggypsum south from Halifax — her own doom,with that of her entire crew, in another storm twoyears later is appended. Junger also providescomparative evidence from fishing boats whichnar rowly survived other storms and thus builds areasonable impression of what happened to theAndrea Gail and her crew — right down to theirsensations as they use up the last air trapped inthe inverted hull.

Those who want to understand how it feelsto die when a rogue wave flips an 80-foot steelboat end for end, will find this book taking themas close to that knowledge as anything can, shortof direct experience. It will certainly take itsreaders a lot closer than most will find comfort-able. Life involves more than simply its ending,however, and Junger succeeds brilliantly inexplaining what drives men to spend most of their

Book Reviews 107

working lives far out to sea and how they (and thewomen and children in their lives) cope with theirbrief periods ashore. The reader is spared nothingof the hard-living, hard-drinking life of the deck-hand on an offshore fishing boat.

Yet this is no trivialized, "tabloid" treatment.If it deals with the darker sides of the fisherman'slot, without offering a balanced account of thegood times, there is nothing sensationalized orexaggerated. Indeed, it would be hard to exagger-ate the description of the storm itself, whenoceanographic data buoys recorded hundred-footwaves and 100-knot winds. Junger does not evenclutter his tale with superlatives; the bare facts arequite sufficient.

The overall effect is riveting and chilling butsomehow the connection with the men who diedfails. This reader was left with sympathy for thesurvivors but throughout the book the deadappear not just as doomed but already as no morethan statistics. Perhaps absolute realism cannotbuild such a connection with people who left fewrecords (and none at all of their last days) ormaybe even Junger shied away from close empa-thy with the characters in his story who had oncebeen living men but whom his writing could onlykill all over again.

That aside, this book is a superb sea story forthose not afraid to face sometimes-brutal reality.It says much about human experience on theocean and to that degree is timeless; as muchabout life (and death) under sail or on a modernwarship as about experiences on a swordfish boat.It is very highly recommended.

Trevor KenchingtonMusquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia

A.J. McCarthy. Bay of Chaleur Forgotten Trea-sures. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1997. xi +147 pp., maps, illustrations, photographs, sources.$16.95, paper; ISBN 1-55109-185-2.

The author of this book of "true stories of ghostships and wrecks, rum running and buried trea-sure, murders and robberies, war heroes andspies" has taken his title from Treasure trove inGaspé and the Baie des Chaleurs by Margaret G.Mac Whirter which, first published in 1919, hasbeen reprinted at least five times.

The introduction to this book outlines the

early history of the south coast of the Baie desChaleurs in and near Nipisguit Bay and includesa small map of the pa rt of the coast betweenBelledune and Miscou island showing the loca-tion of "buried treasure, ship wrecks, trainwrecks, and airplane crashes." Many of theseincidents either took place or had their origin inor near Bathurst, New Brunswick at the head ofNipisguit Bay but only about a quarter of the textis concerned with maritime events. An article onJoseph Cunard and the vessels he built at Bathursthas been extracted almost entirely from ElizabethManny's essay on shipbuilding at Bathurst and,although it includes the names of later ship build-ers, none of the names of vessels built afterCunard's business failure are mentioned. Thereare accounts from local newspapers as early asthe 1830s of storms and shipwrecks. Without anysubstantiating evidence, a violent storm nearShippigan on 21-22 August 1857 is ascribed to anearthquake-generated "tsunami." Other a rt icles areconcerned with tugboats and "hard hat" diving inBathurst harbour and the capture of the GermanU-boat captain Wolfgang Heyda at Grande Ansenear Caraquet after escaping from a prisoner-ofwar camp at Bowmanville, Ontario.

No book on the Baie des Chaleurs would becomplete without some reference to the legend ofthe "Phantom Ship." The earliest version, probab-ly from sometime in the early years of the 1800s,was the appearance in the bay of a square-riggedship whose crew appeared to be going about theirregular duties although the vessel seemed to beon fire. Over the years a number of somewhatsimilar events have been reported, not all ofwhich have included the appearance of a "phan-tom ship." According to the author of this book,these events are associated with a "fire storm" andare followed by violent gales. The meaning of"fire storm" as a meteorological phenomenon isunknown to the reviewer but because the "phan-tom ships" appear before a storm they are probab-ly mirages of vessels much farther out at sea. Forhis own reasons the author has included in histreatmnt of "phantom ships" a repo rt of a three-masted schooner (probably a rum runner) trappedin floating ice in the Baie des Chaleurs in May1924. The story, taken from Treasure Trove inGaspé and the Baie des Chaleurs, concerns thewreck of the barque Colbourne, near Port Danielin 1838, but McCarthy misnames the vessel the


Lady Colbourne and in one place describes it asa schooner.

This book may appeal to those interested inviolent deaths and mystical occurrences in andnear Bathurst but it has little to recommend it toanyone with an interest in maritime studies.

David J. McDougallLachine, Québec

Jukka Eenilä and Marja Pelanne (eds.); JuhaRouhiala (trans.). Nautica Fennica 1997: Suomenmerimuseu/The Maritime Museum of FinlandAnnual Report 1997. Helsinki: National Board ofAntiquities and The Finnish Association forMaritime History, 1997 [orders: The MaritimeMuseum of Finland, Hylkysari, 00570 Helsinki,Finland]. 86 pp., photographs, illustrations,figures, maps. FIM 80, paper; ISBN 951 -616-014-X.

This offering from the Maritime Museum ofFinland, ostensibly an annual repo rt, has a some-what broader range as it covers more than themuseum's activities of the previous year. Thethematic focus of this year's repo rt is marinearchaeology and includes several sho rt reports onmuseum sponsored research projects written bydifferent authors. The attraction of the book isthat it provides, to English readers, informationon recent underwater work in Finland.

For a small work, this is a surprisinglywell-produced and illustrated book, on goodpaper, with few typographical errors. The formatis bilingual with each original Finish articlefollowed by an English translation. As might beexpected, some of the translation is a little raggedand difficult to understand although the essentialmeaning does come through. Presumably as aneconomic measure, illustrations are only includedin the Finish sections albeit with an Englishtranslation of the figure legend. Somewhat annoy-ingly, no figure references appear in the Englishsections which requires some flipping back andforth to fully appreciate the articles. As well,although notes are placed at the end of the Eng-lish sections, full bibliographic references arefound only at the end of the Finish a rticles.

The first three articles are by far the mostsubstantive in that they provide detailed summar-ies of past research projects. Of these, the first

one on shipwrecks and archives remains the mostuseful from a research perspective. Its authorprovides some excellent information on archivalsources and record locations to be found in thevarious national, provincial and local archives ofSweden and Finland that bear on eighteenth-century shipwrecks. Documents, such as adminis-trative, judicial, and auction records can provideuseful information regarding sizes and types ofvessels, cargoes and other relevant material thatcan lead to the location and identification ofshipwrecks. The author also outlines methods ofnarrowing down and focussing archival researchto make searches more efficient and productive.He then goes on to case studies where archivalinformation was instrumental in the identificationof two shipwrecks.

Two articles deal with ceramics recoveredfrom underwater sites. The first describes theisolated discovery of medieval ceramics from anatural harbour in the Hiittinen Archipelago. Adescription of the objects is followed by a discus-sion of the implications for trade, settlement andwarfare. The second paper describes a small col-lection of Meissen porcelain recovered from aRussian merchant vessel that foundered in 1 747.

Besides a description of the finds, the a rticledelves into some of the history surrounding a fewof the key personages involved with the factory,and explains the sty les, motifs and paintingtechniques employed by the factory. Also high-lighted is the impo rtant contribution that objectsfrom precisely dated shipwrecks can make inrefining the dating of such things as stylisticchange, maker's marks and so forth.

The remainder of the book conforms some-what more to an annual report sty le. Three articlessummarize recent underwater work involving themuseum: one details several inspection divescarried out on underwater sites during the pastyear and including a discussion of proposedmarine parks; another describes side scan sonarwork and underwater archaeological investiga-tions in one of the Finnish provinces; the lastdiscusses a cooperative project with Estonia tochart and compile a register of sunken vessels.The book closes with short annual reports of boththe Maritime Museum of Finland and the FinnishAssociation for Maritime History.

This book may have limited appeal and valueas the articles do not provide in-depth descrip-

Book Reviews 109

tions and analyses of the various projects de-scribed. In fairness, this is not the goal, norshould it be, of annual repo rts. The merit of thiswork is that it brings up-to-date information onrecent projects as well as outlines the scope ofwork and research interests of a maritime mu-seum with an active research program. As such, itsucceeds admirably. Readers interested in furtherinformation can contact the museum or research-ers directly. Marine archaeologists and possiblysome material culture researchers will gain themost from this book but perhaps it is better suitedas a reference work for institutional libraries.

R. James RingerOttawa, Ontario

William Barron. Old Whaling Days. 3rd ed.,1895; "Conway Classics," London: ConwayMaritime Press, 1996. viii + 211 pp., appendix.£7.99, cloth; ISBN 0-85177-695-7. Canadiandistributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines,ON.

The Arctic whaling trade in the middle of the lastcentury was a most difficult business. The intensecold, wandering icebergs, and sudden storms,combined with all the usual hazards of whaling,made the trade a by-word for danger andhardship.This book, written by a seventeen-yearparticipant in the industry, captures well the manyhazards of the trade.

When a ship arrived on the whaling grounds,a close watch had to be kept at all times, not justfor whales and icebergs, but for any slightchanges in the light or wind that foretold a changein the weather. Sudden storms and even lesserwinds could start the ice moving and place theship in extreme danger. If the ice moved slowly,there was time to get out of the way, or at least tosaw a dock in the ice to shelter the vessel. But ifthe ice moved quickly, there might be no time,and the ship could be pinched by the ice andstove in. The crew of such vessels were usuallyrescued by another whaling ship, but if none werein sight, they might have to winter ashore, some-times, with the Eskimo.

Barron was interested in the Eskimo peopleand took the trouble to learn their language. Hewent hunting with them and occasionally joinedin their traditional dances. He describes their way

of life in some detail, and records encounters withEskimos who had never seen Europeans before,and were amazed by their guns and "large kayak"(ship).

While Barron was never shipwrecked him-self, the Arctic left its mark on him. He was onceattacked and bitten by a polar bear. On anotheroccasion, he was about to throw a harpoon whenhe was swept overboard by the flick of a whale'stail. Unconscious when he was pulled from thewater, his frozen clothing had to be cut away. Hislife then hung in the balance for six weeks, beforethe ship's doctor was able to pull him through.

William Barron was active during a period ofgreat transition in the trade, when sailing shipsand hand-held harpoons were giving way tosteam-powered vessels and harpoon guns. He wasfully aware of the changes taking place, andconstantly reflects on the advantages of steampower over sail, the new methods over the old.Yet he was also aware of what was being lost. Forinstance, the subtle changes in light and soundthat foretold weather changes were far easier torecognize from a sailing ship than from a noisy,smokey steamer. Perhaps inadvertently, he alsoforeshadowed the demise of the trade from over-fishing, when he gave mention at one point to thefact that fifty-two competing ships were visiblefrom the masthead.

Whether negotiating ice floes near the islandof Disco, or dancing late into the night withEskimo maidens, Barron was fully alive to thegrandeur of his surroundings. Here he describesthe light falling on distant icebergs: "The wonder-ful beauty of these crystal cliffs never appears togreater advantage than when clothed by themidnight sun with all the splendid colours oftwilight glittering in the brilliant heavens, [theicebergs] seeming in the distance like masses ofburnished metal or solid flame." [75]

There is an appendix which gives a briefhistory of the ship on which Barron began hiscareer, and later rose to command. He also pro-vides lists of whaling vessels that operated fromHull, plus a dictionary of Arctic whaling terms.All this makes the reprint of Old Whaling Days aworthy addition to the publisher's "ConwayClassic" series, and at a very reasonable price.

Mark HowardMelbourne, Australia


Madelene Ferguson Allen. Wake of theInvercauld. Shipwrecked in the sub-Antarctic: Agreat-granddaughter's pilgrimage. Auckland,NZ: Exisle Publishing and Montréal and Kings-ton, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen's Universi tyPress, 1997. 256 pp., illustrations, maps, figures,colour photographs, bibliography, index. Cdn$45, cloth; ISBN 0-908988-02-8 (Exisle), 0-7735-1688-3 (MQUP).

At its simplest this is the story of the author'ssuccessful effo rts to test the truthfulness of theaccount written by Robert Holding, her great-grandfather, sixty years after the event, of thetwelve months he spent as a castaway on theremote sub-antarctic Auckland Islands, nearlythree hundred miles south of New Zealand. Toachieve her purpose Allen, a resident of ruralQuebec, conducted a vigorous research pro-gramme that took her to Great Britain, Australia,New Zealand and the Aucklands, where she wasable, with the help of the manuscript, to retraceher ancestor's movements.

This is the bare skeleton of a complex andabsorbing book which interweaves two excitingstories that are one hundred and thirty years apart .The core event is the loss of the new Aberdeenclipper Invercauld in May 1864 on the lethal westcoast of the main island of the group. This classicexample of a lee shore shipwreck on a dark nightis described in Holding's account with greatintensity and detail, despite the passing of sixtyyears. His narrative then deals with the struggle tosurv ive in a hostile environment with little morethan the clothes worn at the instant of the wreck.Confronted by immense physical problems madeworse by the sub-antarctic winter and divided byserious personal conflicts, nineteen castaways, ledby Holding, fought their way to the calmer east-ern shores of the island where they found theruins of an earlier, abandoned settlement. ByAugust only Holding and two other survivorswere left. They were able to reach a small inshoreisland where they built, from turf and timber, ahut in which they sheltered until their rescue inMay of 1865.

The second story is that of the author'sequally determined effort , despite many obstacles,physical and hum an, to fill in the historical back-ground of the manuscript, first seen by her in1984, and to visit and explore the actual scene of

the events it describes. The latter proved the moredifficult, since the Aucklands, a New Zealandpossession, are a strictly protected nature reserve,accessible only to a few privileged visitors.Allen's successful persuasion of the authorities toallow her a ten day visit at her own expenseaboard an officially approved vessel is one of thehighlights of this book.

With an eighty-foot steel ketch as a base,Allen's party had seven days at the islands inDecember 1993, much of that time being spentashore retracing Holding's steps. It is here thatthe technique of running two narratives withalternating passages is most successful. Thereader has a sensation of moving in two timeperiods simultaneously, an illusion helped by theunchanging physical nature of these islands.

The elaborate design of the book with sepiagraphics on most pages, some of which seriouslyinterrupt the flow of the text, may attract criticismfrom readers, but this is a matter of personal t aste.The photographs, however, are brilliant. Sailorswill be taken aback by a glaring error in nauticalterminology on page fifty-eight, probably theresult of a lapse in proof-reading. These, how-ever, are minor blemishes which do not diminishthe appeal of this splendid and enthusiastic bookto a wide variety of readers. The sea is alwayspresent in both narratives and maritime historianswill find much to interest them, including Hold-ing's evocation of the perils of mid-nineteenthcentury seafaring, particularly his vividly realisticdescription of the moments leading up to thewreck, during which discipline and authorityvanished and panic took over, the captain and themates shouting impossible orders to the helplesscrew. It is also a first-hand account of humansurvival in -extreme conditions and as such is agreat adventure tale. Conservationists will ap-plaud the account of New Zealand's policy con-cerning the preservation of this unique wildernessarea. Finally, this work has an interest for thegeneral reader, being a first-class travel bookwhich leaves one with a positive sense of fami-liarity with an extremely isolated and little knownpart of the world. It is compelling reading andhighly recommended.

John BachCoal Point, NSW, Australia

Book Reviews 111

Alan Gurney. Below the Convergence: VoyagesToward Antarctica 1699-1839. New York &London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. ix +315 pp., illustrations, maps, bibliography, index.US $27.50, Cdn $35, cloth; ISBN 0-393-03949-8.Distributed in Canada for Penguin Books Canadaby Canbook Distribution Se rv ices.

Alan Gurney is a yacht designer and photogra-pher from the Isle of Islay and has lectured onLinblad Explorer trips to both polar regions.Coming from that home of magnificent malts,well versed in the ways of small craft, and accus-tomed to lecturing to interested but not necessar-ily academic audiences, he has written a distinc-tive, well-informed survey of early antarcticexploration that reads in a brisk easy manner.

He first sets his stage. The Southern Oceansurrounding the Antarctic continent is unique innot having any coastlines to define its farthestextremities. Its meeting with the neighbouringoceans is called "the convergence." The oceantraveller's transit is clearly marked by a pro-nounced drop in the air temperature. FromEdmund Halley's first dip "below the conver-gence" to the beginning of the period of seriousnational expeditions in the late 1830s, all voyag-ers were confronted with four basic challenges,each of which are discussed in a separate chapter.They were: first, the need to determine what wasin the southern seas; second, the problems ofnavigation including determining longitude; third,scurvy, and finally the character of the area.Halley, the astronomer of comet fame, was thefirst to venture into the area. In a vessel onlysixty-four feet long with a displacement of aboutsixty tons, he traversed the Atlantic mapping thechange of magnetic variation. In late January1700 Halley crossed the convergence and com-mented on the cold "scarce tollerable to us used towarmer Climates." [80] He stayed in the regionfor perhaps two weeks. The next explorer, almostseventy years later, was James Cook.

Gurney spends a chapter discussing Cook theman, thus giving context for a second chapter onCook's second voyage which destroyed Dalrym-ple's theories. In a book of twelve chapters thisattention paid Cook, given his tremendousachievements is an appropriate balance. The mostimmediate legacy of Cook's third voyage was theopening of the fur trade with China. After Cook

further discoveries were the outcome of economicand political competition, which are well synthe-sized here. The search for new sealing groundsled hunters, balancing risks against potentialprofits, ever further south. Imperial adventuresalso led Russia to launch an antarctic expedition.Its leader, Bellingshausen, became the secondnavigator to circumnavigate Antarctica. Bellings-hausen went where Cook had not, and became thefirst to sight the antarctic continent at what is nowknown as the Finibul Ice Shelf. Unfortunately hisreports were buried and lost to view in Russianofficialdom. The only English translation of hisjournal, was published by the Hakluyt Socie ty in1945, and is hard to find. Very soon afterBellingshausen's discovery, a British navalexpedition in a chartered whaling vessel, follow-ing up a whaling master's discovery, charted theSouth Shetland Islands, and found the straitseparating them from the continent.

Gurney accords James Weddell the samestatus of James Cook — two chapters. His furthestsouth penetration, and the discovery of the Wed-dell Sea justify the space. Weddell was followedby John Briscoe, the third captain to circumnavi-gate the continent. He was fortunate that hisemployer, the London whaling firm SamuelEnderby then in its third and final generation,supported his geographic work at the cost of lostprofits. A final chapter on the whalers Kemp andBalleny brings the voyages of discovery of hisperiod to a close.

Gurney is not afraid to express his opinions.They include a distaste for Sir John Barrow,support for Beaglehole's assessment of the For-sters, and a willingness to take potshots at Ameri-cans. He also takes time to provide interestingand tangentially related trivia in footnotes. Thuswe learn that a daughter of the Enderby family,Briscoe's employers, was the mother of GeneralGordon killed at Khartoum and of the ultimatefate of the skin of the Weddell seal that led to theidentification of the species. Gurney clearlyunderstands the limitations of single volumehistories, and has met them well. This is a goodbook for anyone with an interest in early voyagesof antarctic exploration.

William GloverLondon, Ontario


Gert Lange (ed.). Sonne, Sturm und weisseFinsternis: Die Chronik der ostdeutschenAntarktisforschung. Hamburg: Ernst Kabel for theDeutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, 1996. 295 pp.,photographs (b+w, colour), maps, illustrations,figures, index. DM 68, cloth; ISBN 3-8225-0385-1.

On opening this volume, I could not help thinkingof Luc Marie Bayle's delightful book La Voyagede la Nouvelle Incomprise (Editions Ozanne,1953), his personal story of French Antarcticendeavours immediately after World War II, toldand illustrated in his inimitable sagacious yethumorous way. One of his drawings shows theAntarctic as a vast big round cheese with manynations trying to secure wedges of the said cheesefor themselves. In this "Chronicle of E ast GermanAntarctic Investigations," Gert Lange gives us thestory of one or two of those wedges between theyears 1959 and 1996, wedges not claimed by EastGermany but by the USSR on whose logisticalsuppo rt the East German scientists depended.

The co-operation between the East Germansand Russians shines through the forty-two con-temporary accounts which, very wisely, have notbeen adjusted to present-day political conditions.Participants of the expeditions, be they scientists,technicians, medical doctors or cooks, speakdirectly to the reader, rather than hiding awayfrom the tensions caused by mental strain ordifferences in national customs, as when, forinstance, the Russians overindulged at times invodka. The overwhelming tone of these accountsis that of comradeship in a battle against nature,with temperatures down to -80°C, blizzards andcrevasses. Technical break-downs, dramaticrescue missions by Russian pilots, a dreadful fireat an isolated station all come to life in thesepages as does the painstaking hard work carriedout by scientists of many different disciplines andgovernment branches. It might not be amiss tomention here that the very first obse rvation of theby-now-infamous ozone hole was made by EastGerman scientists. The book closes, most encour-agingly, with a chapter on the "Great Clean-up."The garbage left by these expeditions — in all justabout 800 tons of it — was removed from theAntarctic after many consultations on interna-tional levels and with the financial suppo rt of theGerman government.

While German participation in polar researchwas quite extensive until the outbreak of WorldWar II, such activities were split up, like thecountry itself, during the post-war era betweenthe West German Al fred Wegner Institute atBremerhaven and its East German equivalent atPotsdam. Both institutions pursued their ownseparate priorities, so much so that after thecollapse of the East German government, therewere fears that their polar research programmemight be abolished. Fortunately the West Ger-mans had concentrated their effo rts on the mari-time surroundings of the Antarctic, while the EastGermans, with their own scientific programmesintegrated with the Russian expeditions, gavetheir attention to continental problems, generatingthereby a rich harvest of scientific knowledge.Since the work programmes of the two institu-tions complimented each other so well, it wasdecided to join the two. As a result, nothing of theEast German effo rts has been lost.

As one who grew up with popular bookswritten by Antarctic explorers such as Sco tt ,Shackleton, Charcot, de Gerlache, Drygalski,Mawson, Filchner and many others, I am in-trigued by the difference of approach, questioningand goals of contemporary polar investigators. Ithas been said that the "heroic" age of polarexploration has gone forever since the geograph-ical exploration of the Antarctic continent haslargely been completed. The very word "explorer"has sunk into oblivion. Explorers might be extinctas a species but scientific work in the Antarcticstill needs heroic effo rts to get done as this bookshows. For this reason I would strongly recom-mend an English translation of the Chronik; as apopularly written book and like no other recentbook to my knowledge, it shows the new ap-proach to polar research. It would fit in well withthose by earlier explorers and authors and providea measure of continuity of human endeavour.

The Antarctic continent can tell us what iswrong in our dealings with the Earth and this iswhat present-day scientists, the successor toearlier explorers, are trying to learn about — yes,those same scientists, the high priests of modernsociety, whose work we so quickly blame formany of the problems besetting our planet.

Neils JannaschTantallon, Nova Scotia

Book Reviews 113

Doug Gray. R.M.S. Nascopie: Ship of the North.Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1997. iv + 112 pp.,photographs, maps, illustrations, references, ack-nowledgments. $19.95, paper; ISBN 0-919614-70-1. Distributed by Prologue Inc., Québec.

Few ships have played as significant a role inCanadian history than the Hudson's Bay Com-pany's Nascopie. Built in 1911 specifically forservice in the No rth, Nascopie outlived many ofher peers in a fascinating and impo rtant careerthat lasted until 1947 when the ship struck anuncharted reef and was lost. During those years,Nascopie supplied HBC posts along the shores ofHudson Bay, Labrador and the Strait, the easternArctic. She served, as the book jacket conciselyputs it, as a "lifeline, mail ship, office, medicalclinic court house and love boat," the last a refer-ence to the ship's occasional delivery of brides tothe far flung northern outposts of the HBC'scommercial empire.

In addition to these duties, Nascopie alsoworked as a sealer, freighted supplies to Russiaduring World War I, and saw serv ice as well inthe north during World War II. Her exploits, andthose of her masters and crew, the most famous ofwhom, Thomas Smellie, have been recounted inpart, notably in Roland Wild's Arctic Command:The Story of Smellie of the Nascopie (RyersonPress, 1955). However, the complete story of theship has not been told until now.

In a detailed, loving account, Doug Grayrecounts Nascopie's career, with chapters ex-plaining how the Arctic environment and theHBC's unique corporate culture shaped the ship'sdesign and construction. These introductory chap-ters are particularly impo rtant, placing the shipinto context. The detailed discussion in the chap-ter on navigating in the No rth, the concept ofoperations for the ship, and the "Technical Inter-lude: Designing Nascopie" are worth the price ofthe book alone.

The other delightful aspect of the book isGray's down-home sty le and the ability to tell agood tale which, he forthrightly admits in theintroduction, is a "great sea story about a greatship.' [iv] There are no footnotes, but the sourcesare noted in the back, save those which Gray alsonotes in the introduction were "something Ipicked up in the Coast Guard 10 or 15 years ago."[iv] He goes on to say that this probably won't

i mpress "scholarly types," but I disagree. R.M.S.Nascopie: Ship of the North is a small but impres-sive tome and a worthy addition to the library ofanyone interested in the No rth, the HBC or just aplain, well-told tale. A number of photographsflesh out the story, including some delightful car-toons, a few well-selected maps, and two appen-dices, one listing the ship's masters and the otherthe characteristics of the HBC and the govern-ment's ships that relate to Nascopie's story.

James P. DelgadoVancouver, British Columbia

James Delgado. Made for the Ice: A Report on theWreck of the Hudson's Bay Company ShipBaymaud, ex-Polarskibet Maud (1917-1930).Vancouver: Vancouver Maritime Museum andUnderwater Archaeological Socie ty of BritishColumbia, 1997. 32 pp., figures, photographs,maps, sources. $12, paper; ISBN 0-9695010-4-8.

Named after the Queen of Norway, RoaldAmundsen's Maud was launched at Asker on 7June 1917. Christening her with a block of ice,Amundsen said: "You are made for ice. You shallspend your best years in the ice and you shall doyour work in the ice." [7] James Delgado's Madefor the Ice contains an account of what has be-fallen Maud in the eighty years since her launch-ing, a report on her condition as determined bydives in which he took part in 1995 and 1996, andrecommendations for her future. It is a story inwhich the powerful forces of ice and money —too much ice and too little money — played andcontinue to play major roles.

Modelled after Nansen's Fram, Maud wasbuilt to drift in the ice towards the No rth Polewhile serving as a scientific research station.Although her scientific and geographic accom-plishments were impressive, ice conditions andlack of funds bedevilled Maud's years withAmundsen. In 1925 the Hudson's Bay Companybought her from Amundsen's creditors andrefitted her as a Western Arctic supply ship.Named the Baymaud, she served in the WesternArctic in 1926 and 1927. Her deep draft, how-ever, made her unsuitable for this work. In thesummer of 1927 she was moored at CambridgeBay as a floating warehouse, machine shop andwireless station. By 1930 a small leak was be-


coming more serious. It was suggested that she beput on the beach to continue in operation as awarehouse and wireless station. Perhaps this wasnot possible, or not considered worth doing. Atany rate, Baymaud sank at her moorings, probab-ly in the winter of 1930-1931.

And there she remains, a partially submergedwreck, battered by vicissitudes both man-madeand natural. In 1990 the Hudson's Bay Companysold her for a dollar to the municipality of Asker.The intention was to raise the ship and return herto her home country for restoration and perma-nent display. A diving inspection in 1990 con-cluded that salvage was practicable but should bedone within ten years because of the destructiveaction of the ice working on the ship. In 1993,Asker received a Canadian Cultural PropertiesExport permit to return Maud to Norway. Sometime later Asker's rights to the ship were trans-ferred to Tromsø. The people of Cambridge Bay,however, are not happy at the prospect of losinga significant local landmark and a potentialsource of tourism revenue. The eventual fate ofMaud is now being reconsidered, hence the 1995and 1996 dives under the leadership of JamesDelgado of the Vancouver Maritime Museum.

Made for the Ice provides a thorough des-cription of the wreck site and condition of Maud,illustrated with photographs and plans. Delgadomakes it clear that Maud's importance goesbeyond the sentimental and patriotic. Modelled,with improvements, on Fram, just as St. Rochwas modelled with improvements on her, she isthe middle link in a chain of three great modernpolar ships. Fram is preserved in Oslo, St. Rochin Vancouver. The only other polar explorationvessels surviving as museum ships are Gjoa inNorway, Hero in the United States and Discoveryin Scotland. As two-dimensional plans are nosubstitute for the three-dimensional ship, Maud isa crucial source, a "wooden archive" if you like,for the history of polar exploration.

Delgado concludes with a set of options forMaud's future. She can be left as she is, in whichcase she will eventually settle beneath the waterand be accessible only to divers. She can bestabilized as a wreck in Cambridge Bay. She canbe recovered and restored for preservation as afloating or d ry-land display, or po rtions of theship can be recovered for d ry-land display. Inpresenting these options Delgado never loses

sight of the fact that Maud is a ship of interna-tional impo rtance, to which both Norway andCanada have valid claims. (In fact, he is so fair toNorway that he identifies the great Swede, A.E.Nordenskiöld, as Norwegian. [7])

Made for the Ice belongs in polar librariesfor its documentation both of a famous ship andof a maritime heritage site of inte rnational signifi-cance. For Canadians, it raises questions that gobeyond this one ship. Much of our maritime andarchitectural heritage is in our north and Arctic.Can tourism make the preservation of such siteseconomically feasible? And should it be expectedto? In the meantime, the ice keeps working onMaud. Delgado gives a rough estimate of two tofive years before there is a major hull collapse.

Anne MortonWinnipeg, Manitoba

Ian A. Miller. Voyages Into Eternity. BishopAuckland, Durham: Pentland Press, 1997. 308pp., photographs, appendices, bibliography.£17.50, cloth; ISBN 1-85821-446-7.

There are two reasons for writing an autobio-graphy. One is personal: perhaps a form of self-affirmation for the writer. but chiefly to leave arecord for descendants and family. As someonewho comprehends very clearly his origins andculture as a lowland Scot, Ian Miller has suc-ceeded admirably in achieving this objective. Hehas provided his descendants with an understand-ing of their ancestry and connections and anaccount of his own eventful life, and while I amsure that his grandchildren will find the bookinteresting, the story will be even more fascinat-ing to future generations. The other reason for anautobiography, by people who have been in-volved in great events, is to clarify and interpretthose events for posterity in general. In thisregard, the important events with which Millerwas concerned were not affairs of state, nor thosewhich make newspaper headlines, but the highlytechnical advances in navigation and oceano-graphy which have occurred since World War II.

Miller served his apprenticeship pre-war inthe Bank Line and then had an eventful anddangerous war, spending most of it at sea andsurviving the sinking, by enemy action, of twoships: the tanker Inverlane and the cargo ship

Book Reviews 115

Cedarbank. A Master Mariner at war's end, hewas hired by the Crown Agents for the coloniesand sent to Iraq which in those days was underBritish "protection," with its oil industry and po rtsfirmly under British control. He served as pilot,harbour master and, on occasion, as CommandingOfficer of the Iraqi Royal Yacht. Correctly sens-ing future trouble in the region and with a youngfamily requiring schooling, he joined the Cana-dian Hydrographic Serv ice in the fifties. Frombeing a senior "burra sahib" with se rvants, carsand launches at his command, he now foundhimself, as a junior hydrographer, toting instru-ments and tripods up hills on bar ren St. LawrenceGulf islands. However, ability always tells and hewas soon involved in early precise electronicnavigation surveying systems. This led to co-operation with the Decca Company which wasinstalling navigational "chains" in Canada and, inassociation with the Bendix Corporation, in theUnited States. In due course he joined Bendix androse to high executive positions in that organiza-tion and its subsidiaries. He was involved with"Project Caesar," the installation of the underwa-ter passive detection system which played such alarge role in the tracking of Soviet submarinesduring the Cold War; with the development of theOptimum Ship Routing system, which providesbest tracks for shipping derived from past andpresent weather factors; with oceanographic andenvironmental studies in the Gulf of Mexico andeven with "Project Mohole," an unsuccessfulattempt to drill through the earth's crust to themantle.

The reader tracing his way through thesetechnological events will find that they are mixedin with descriptions of the author's family'sweddings, jobs, visits, travels, houses, cars and soon. However, the book is more than just a familymemoir and we learn the reasons for the success(or failure) of a number of scientific projects,much in the news at the time. For my pa rt, I mostenjoyed his account of voyages across the Pacificon his first ship, a typical tramp, and the free-wheeling life in the Gulf in the years just after thewar. It was an interesting life, one that is welldescribed. His great-grandchildren will be grate-ful.

C. Douglas MaginleyMahone Bay, Nova Scotia

Briton C. Busch and Barry M. Gough (eds.). FurTraders from New England: The Boston Men inthe North Pacific, 1787-1800. The Narratives ofWilliam Dane Phelps, William Sturgis and JamesGilchrist Swan. Spokane, WA: A rthur H. Clark,1997. 137 pp., appendices, bibliography, index.US $29.50, cloth; ISBN 0-87062-261-7.

Fur Traders from New England is a deceptivetitle, evoking as it does the image of RockyMountain traders like Nathaniel Wyeth and othersof the 1830s. But well before Wyeth and hiscounterparts there was another — and perhapsmore important — Boston-based fur trade: thetrade for the pelts of sea otters from the coldwaters of the Pacific Northwest, pelts that were akey item in the China trade that helped to openNew England and the United States to the globaleconomic community. This slim volume containsedited narratives of early participants in thatBoston-North Pacific-China trade.

The primary manuscript reproduced in thiswork is "Solid Men of Boston in the Northwest,"long recognized by maritime and fur trade histori-ans as one the most reliable of the accounts of thelate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryNorthwest coast trade. Written by the Boston seacaptain and historian William Dane Phelps, thisdocument provides first-hand evidence of the in-terlocking trade between New England and Chinain metal goods, furs, sandalwood and spice. Thegreat advantage of Phelps' account is that he wasa player in the great global game and thus offersmore than just an interpretive view of one of themore intriguing trading patterns of the era.

Three other primary documents serve asappendices to the Phelps text, all of them attri-buted to William Sturgis of Boston who, like -Phelps, was involved both as a mariner and as amerchant in the Northwest fur trade. The first ofthese is a reprint of a lecture on the trade given bySturgis to the Mercantile Library Association ofBoston in 1846. While of lesser value as anhistorical document than the Phelps account, theSturgis lecture provides a concise look at a mid-nineteenth century New England perspective on"the Oregon Question" — the question of whetherBritain or the United States should control the"Oregon Country ," generally acceded to includethe bulk of the Columbia bas in. It will come as nosurprise to readers familiar with the Oregon


controversy that Sturgis attributed the blame forthe failure to arrive at a peaceful settlement by1 846 directly to the New Englanders' chief rivalsin the northern fur trade: the Hudson's BayCompany. The two remaining appendices fromSturgis, while less instructive in terms of interna-tional power politics, are very useful historicaldocuments for those interested in the Northwesttrade. They include: first, a summary of the num-ber of vessels employed in the Northwest trade,the quantity of fur collected, and price of furs andother art icles in the Canton market for the years1799 to 1802; and, second, a listing of Americanvessels engaged in the Northwest trade up to1808. Each of these documents is invaluable as asource of data not otherwise widely available.

The co-editors of Fur Traders from NewEngland have amply annotated each of the fourdocuments with footnotes that are nearly asvaluable as the texts themselves and have pro-vided the reader with a succinct but instructiveintroduction that places the documents in both thecontext of their time and place and the context ofcurrent scholarship. While this small book shouldnot be allowed to stand on its own as a source forthe period and the process, when it is combinedwith other works such as James Gibson's BostonShips, Otter Skins, and China Goods it becomesan extremely valuable addition to the literature ofthe North American fur trade.

John L. AllenStorrs, Connecticut

Frank L. Fox. A Distant Storm: The Four Days'Battle of 1666. Rotherfield, E. Sussex: JeanBoudriot Publications, 1997. xiii + 425 pp.,illustrations (incl. colour plates), figures, endmaps, appendices, notes, sources, index. £60, US$100, cloth; ISBN 0-948864-29-X.

On 1 June (Old S ty le) 1666, in what is known asthe Second Anglo-Dutch war, 1664-1667, a largeEnglish fleet met a larger Dutch fleet in battle offthe mouth of the Thames River; during the nextfour days the opposing warships pounded oneanother until the English withdrew. Thus endedthe longest, largest, and perhaps the bloodiestnaval engagement fought at sea during the age ofsail. Yet very little followed from this enormouscontest whose results were reversed less than

eight weeks later. No clearer example exists ofthe ambiguous nature of naval victory. A DistantStorm is the first detailed study of the batt le.

This tremendous encounter has always beena bit of a puzzle to naval historians for it resultedin an English defeat owing chiefly to Englishacceptance of wholly inaccurate intelligencereports that a French fleet was approaching to jointhe Dutch. This caused King Charles II and hiscouncil of war to send the co-commander of theEnglish fleet, Prince Rupe rt, down the Channelwith twenty ships to intercept the French, leavinghis associate co-commander, General GeorgeMonck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, with an inferiorfleet to face the Dutch. Why the English intelli-gence was so bad, and the nature of Frenchintentions towards England are but two of themysteries that the author attempts to clear up inhis reexamination of the Four Days' Battle.

The author is already known for his GreatShips: The Battle Fleet of King Charles II, pub-lished in 1980. In this new monograph, he pre-sents a careful look at the events and decisionsleading up to the Four Days' Battle and a detailedreconstruction of the complex manoeuvringsduring the tremendous encounter itself. Thougharranged into nineteen chapters followed bythirteen appendices, the author organized thebook's contents into roughly equal parts dealingwith first, the political and naval contexts of theperiod, and second, the strategy and tactics of thebattle. The latter section is clearly the focus of theauthor's attention; it is devoted chiefly to recon-ciling often conflicting evidence, and elaboratingupon the complex tactics involved during thelong course of the struggle.

Not surprising in light of his publisher'sreputation, A Distant Storm is lavishly illustratedwith three hundred reproductions of paintings,including twenty-two colour plates, maps anddrawings. This is just as well; for while theauthor's study of the battle is exhaustive, hiscontextual treatment of the Second Anglo-DutchWar is ordinary. It is written without reference toany of the major works concerning either theinternational diplomacy of the period or theRestoration and Dutch navies that have appearedduring the last score of years. Works by Israel,Jones, Capp, Davies, and Bruijn are conspicuousby their absence. The author is also not adverse toemploying annoying anachronisms. Thus, Louis

Book Reviews 117

XIV's France is described as a "protototalitarian"state as repressive as any modern dictatorship incomparison to the "quasi-democratic" Dutch. Hehas conveniently forgotten the Dutch mob thattore Jan de Will and his brother to pieces in 1672and the England of Judge Jeffreys and the BloodyAssize. It appears that the book is primarilyintended for those who admire fine editions thatare strongest on visual attractiveness.

James PritchardKingston, Ontario

Nicholas Tracy. Nelson's Battles: The Art ofVictory in the Age of Sail. Annapolis: NavalInstitute Press, 1996. 224 pp., illustrations, maps,figures, appendices (incl. further readings), index.US $39.95, Cdn $55.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-621-3. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing,St. Catharines, ON.

There is little doubt that the name of HoratioNelson will forever be associated with victories —Cape St. Vincent (1797), The Nile (1799), Copen-hagen (1801), and Trafalgar (1805). There have,however, been very few good single-volumetreatments in recent years of Nelson's strategyand tactics and the background to them, theexception being Geoffrey Bennett's The Battle ofTrafalgar (1977). With Nelson's Battles,Nicholas Tracy fills that gap in the literature.Drawing on his own wide-ranging studies ofnaval warfare in the Age of Sail and on the workof other authorities, such as Corbett, Creswell,Lavery, and Tunstall, Tracy sets Nelson's greatvictories within the context of 150 years of devel-opments in ship construction, signalling, tacticaland strategic thinking, and training and moralefactors. As such, the volume is a great and veryuseful work of synthesis.

The volume comprises six pa rts of unequallength: "Nelson and Sea Power," "Guns, Shipsand Battle Tactics," "Cape St Vincent and TheNile," "Copenhagen," "Trafalgar," and an epiloguewhich examines the consequences of Trafalgarand assesses "The Nelson Legacy." The first twoparts, some forty per cent of the text, are devotedto a description and analysis of what is essentiallythe vital background to Nelson's great victories —Nelson's own early career, British naval strategy,the development of the ship of the line, signals

and instructions, and the evolution of navaltactics. Typical of Tracy's approach to and hand-ling of this material is a skilful if orthodox sum-mary of British naval strategy. It was the contend-ing strategic requirements of counter-invasionwork, mercantile and colonial interests, the needto obtain naval stores, and economic injury to theenemy that Nelson served and that his battlessupported. Tracy, rightly in my view, sets thoserequirements in their proper context.

The treatment of Nelson's battles in Pa rts III,IV and V does not present any new facts, notbecause Tracy's accounts are in any way unsoundor incomplete, but rather because there is so verylittle new to tell. Nelson has a well-earned reputa-tion for impetuosity, dynamic leadership, andtactical innovation. However, as Tracy stresses,Nelson's tactics were based as much upon acareful and successful assimilation of the lessonsthat had been learned by the Royal Navy and byNelson himself from earlier battles as uponinnovation. It was really Nelson's leadershipsty le, his innate ability to take the measure of theenemy, and his willingness to engage the enemythat defined the "Nelson Touch." The value of thevolume lies precisely in its setting of Nelson'sgreat victories within their technical, tactical andtemporal contexts and in the way it shows thespecial, perhaps unique contribution that wasmade by Nelson himself. Tracy is also undoubt-edly correct when he argues, in the epilogue, thatthe Royal Navy faltered when it attempted toformalize Nelson's tactics, while abandoningNelson's essential humanity and leadership s ty le.

The text is profusely illustrated throughoutwith finely reproduced contemporary drawings,engravings and paintings — some well known,others less so and all, unfortunately, in black andwhite — and a host of track charts that wouldappear to have been especially commissioned forthe volume. There is a brief but excellent list ofsuggestions for further reading and a detailedindex, which I found to be particularly helpful.David Brown has contributed a thoughtful intro-duction. All in all, this well-written and carefullyresearched study will be of great interest andvalue, whether serving naval officer or student ofnaval warfare in the Age of Sail.

G. Edward ReedOttawa, Ontario


Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf (eds.). EveryMan Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of First-hand Accounts from the Age of Nelson 1793-1815. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997. xxxvii+ 425 pp., illustrations, figures, maps, selectedbibliography, index. US $27.50, Cdn $38.95,cloth; ISBN 0-8050-4608-9. Canadian distributor,Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Markham, ON.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable volume of mari-time memoirs from the classic age of sailing war-ships. The selections range from the officers onthe quarterdeck down to the Ordinary Seaman onthe main gun deck. The real interest here is theview from "the sharp end" of naval life in a dan-gerous war: feelings of men going into ba ttle, per-sonal friendships and animosities, vignettes of lifeon rare shore leaves, conditions of daily se rv ice,all the ingredients which usually escape naval his-tories concentrating on grand strategy, tactics, andthe lives of great leaders. There are no undiscov-ered accounts here; all the selections have beenpublished before, as the editors cheerfully admit.Indeed, many readers will undoubtedly recognizeseveral selections from the Navy Records Socie tyvolumes, the memoirs of Lord Cochrane, andsnippets published in other general works. Thereal joy of this book is that so many poignantmemoirs are gathered together so handily.

It is not a "scholarly" work. Introductory andfollow-up commentary is supplied, but often in achatty tone (Cochrane is described as "one of thefightingest captains" in the Navy), and the back-ground information is sometimes inaccurate. Theopening section tells us that in 1793 the Britishfleet totaled 115 vessels, including seventy-fiveships-of-the-line. [3] This is quite bizarre, as thenumbers were closer to over ninety Line of Battleships and over 170 frigates, not to mention small-er craft. We are assured further on [169] that atTrafalgar Nelson wore his "honorary medals,"while one always assumed he actually wore thereal ones. Clearly there is more of King thanHattendorf in the editing. Those issues, however,are of little impo rtance, because this book is acelebration of shipboard life, and readers willlook elsewhere for academic verities.

There are twenty-two selections, nine for theWars of the French Revolution, seven for theNapoleonic phase, and five for the War of 1812.Each one is worth reading, and designating

favourites is a very subjective exercise. Thedrama of famous battles is present in Dillon'seyewitness account of the Glorious First of Juneof 1794, and in Robinson's repo rt of Trafalgar asseen from the lower deck of Victory. SamuelLeech recounts the loss of HMS Macedonian toUSS United States in 1812 in gripping detail. Thereal human pain and suffering depicted here,hardened sailors weeping at the loss of friends, isa useful reminder that glory had a nasty price.

It is perhaps the memoirs of the unsunglower deck which are the most poignant. Particu-larly touching and amusing at the same time arethe writings of Jacob Nagle. Reproduced withevery imaginable error of spelling and grammar,they still impress one with the man's indomitablespirit, resourcefulness and fighting skills. AnAmerican who had served in the US Navy and theRoyal Navy and deserted from both, he wasfinally tracked down in London and reinstated inthe RN. His life ashore, in pubs, with poor girlsprostituting themselves to support their mothers,strangers helping him avoid the press gangs, allgive a very non-Hornblower view of how navallife was perceived by the lower decks. Naglewould never be an ultra-loyal captain's servantworshipping the deck his gentleman-hero walkedon. In the same vein, but more humourous, is thetale of "The Noted Pimp of Lisbon." SamuelGardner, albeit a future Commander, had a fineeye for dialect and character, and his descriptionsof characters on his ship cannot fail to amuse.

Lord Cochrane appears in an excerpt tellinghow his little Speedy of fourteen guns battled andcaptured the Spanish El Gamo of thirty-two guns,a very exciting and very Hornblowerish action.The selection on the death of Nelson by thesurgeon Dr. Beatty is doubtless familiar to allstudents of this period, as it has been quotednumerous times. Yet it holds its fascination and isa welcome inclusion.

The editors have included some items notstrictly naval: the Battle of St. Vincent is de-scribed by an army officer who was a passengeron a warship; and the Battle of Corunna is de-scribed by a young officer who was ashore assist-ing in the embarkation of troops. Another futureAdmiral, George Jackson, tells a rivetting story ofescapes from various French prisoner of warcamps and jails from 1809-1812. While not"oceanic" in subject matter, such selections do

Book Reviews 119

remind us that all naval life did not necessarilyoccur on board ship.

Several selections deal with the War of 1812,and while this is probably partly to attract Ameri-can buyers (Captain Porter's cruise on the westcoast of South America gets fifty pages!) thechoices are apt. One is from an American priva-teer, one is an American victory (Macedonian andUnited States) and one a British victory (HMSPhoebe and USS Essex) which, we are assured,was the result of unprincipled British conduct.

There are other stories here, and those brieflymentioned have far more of interest than can everbe described in a sho rt review. All, of course, arefrom English-speaking peoples, and one regretssomewhat that a French or Spanish selection islacking. Still, that was not the editors' intention,and the work is not much harmed by the omis-sion. Anyone interested in this "golden age ofsail" will be pleased to possess this book.

Paul WebbLondon, Ontario

Faye Margaret Kert. Prizes and Prejudice: Priva-teering and Naval Prize in Atlantic Canada in theWar of 1812. "Research in Maritime History," No.11; St. John's, NF: International Maritime Eco-nomic History Association, 1997. viii + 253 pp.,illustrations, tables, bibliography. US $15, paper;ISBN 0-9681288-1-5.

Faye Kert has written the definitive study of theeconomic, political, and social impact of priva-teering and naval prize in Atlantic Canada duringthe War of 1812. Much of this is based on recordsof the Vice-Admiralty Cou rt at Halifax whichdocument prize-making by both privateers andthe Royal Navy.

Kert begins with a brief introduction of theorigins and evolution of privateering, as well as auseful review of the historiography of War of1812 privateering. She then discusses in turn thecauses of the war, the evolution of prize law andits interpretation by the admiralty cou rts of bothBritain and the United States, the practice ofprivateering during the war, how both British andAmerican naval vessels applied prize-making,and the economic impact of prizes and privateer-ing. Seven extensive appendices include a list ofprize cases appearing before the Vice-Admiralty

Court at Halifax during 1812-1815, the standinginterrogatories concerning prizes, and lists ofNova Scotia and New Brunswick letter of marquevessels and Royal Navy vessels and their prizes.An extensive bibliography completes the study.

By 1812 prize-making and privateering wereimportant weapons of war at sea. Kert describesthe War of 1812 as "declared by the unpreparedand fought by the unwilling for reasons thatremain unexplained." Inconclusive militarily, thewar nonetheless merits study from an economicviewpoint as a war against trade. Not only animpo rtant turning point in the mercantile relation-ship between Great Britain and the United States,the war was the last major inte rnational conflict inwhich privateering played a significant role.

Kert concludes that US privateers were morenumerous, larger, and more heavily armed thantheir Canadian counterparts. Provincial privateercaptures were usually of smaller vessels with lessvaluable cargoes. Nonetheless privateering re-mained popular throughout the conflict and theHalifax Vice-Admiralty Cou rt heard more thansix hundred cases (including vessels captured bythe Royal Navy). The mere presence of thesevessels along the coasts of New Brunswick andNova Scotia helped compensate for the lack ofRoyal Navy vessels there, particularly at thebeginning of the war. Most of the vessels con-demned were later sold at auction and contributedto the commercial life of the Atlantic provinces.Kert concludes that investors in privateering cameprimarily from the merchant class rather than thepolitical or social élite, and contrary to the quasi-pirate stereotype, privateersmen of AtlanticCanada tended to be "well capitalized, law-abid-ing, business-like, generally well-behaved, andmoderately successful."

Owners of private armed vessels had littledifficulty securing crews during the war. As inthe United States, privateering in Canada wasmuch more popular than naval se rv ice, largelybecause of better wages and working conditions.Privateersmen from New Brunswick and NovaScotia also preferred cooperation to competition,supporting one another's activities and oftensharing the financial rewards. While the warbrought financial ruin to the New England mari-time industry and even prompted talk of separa-tion from the United States, the security affordedby the Royal Navy brought unprecedented pro-


sperity to the Canadian Atlantic provinces.Kert's assertion that the War of 1812 was the

last conflict in which commerce raiding played amajor role ignores the US Civil War and WorldWars I and II. One might also disagree with herstatement that "in two and a half years of war, theUnited States developed a small but potent navycapable of meeting, and even defeating, RoyalNavy ships." Apart from victories on inland lakesErie and Champlain — admittedly of great strate-gic importance in the conflict — US Navy victor-ies at sea were largely limited to the first monthsof the war. These points aside, Kert's study is avaluable addition to our understanding of the Warof 1812. It will not need to be done again.

Spencer C. TuckerLexington, Virginia

James C. Bradford (ed.). Quarterdeck andBridge: Two Centuries of American Naval Lead-ers. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996. xviii+ 455 pp., illustrations, photographs, index. US$42.50, Cdn $60.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-073-8.US $22.95, Cdn $31.95, paper; ISBN 0-55750-096-7. Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing,St. Catharines, ON.

Quarterdeck and Bridgeis a series of biographicalsketches of twenty highly prominent officers ofthe United States Navy from Esek Hopkins in the1770s to Elmo Zumwalt in the 1970s. Fourteen ofthe essays are reprinted, with varying degrees ofrevision, from three earlier volumes edited byJames Bradford and published by the NavalInstitute Press: Command under Sail: Makers ofthe American Naval Tradition, 1775-1850 (1985);Captains of the Old Steam Navy: Makers of theAmerican Naval Tradition, 1840-1880 (1986);and Admirals of the New Steel Navy: Makers ofthe American Naval Tradition, 1880-1930 (1990).Six sketches — those of World War II and ColdWar naval leaders — are new to the presentvolume, presumably drawn from essays preparedfor a fourth volume of Makers of the AmericanNaval Tradition which has never appeared.

The authors' research and writing strategiesvary. Robert Seager II distilled his book-lengthbiography of Alfred Thayer Mahan into a highlycondensed interpretative essay. Others, for whomWilliam N. Still writing on David Glasgow

Farragut may stand as representative, supple-mented the work of earlier comprehensive biogra-phers with significant archival research of theirown. John F. Wukovits was content to rely on theexisting scholarship for the factual basis of hisbrief life of William F. Halsey and focused in-stead on providing an unblinking critical assess-ment of his subject's great strengths and equallyspectacular weaknesses as a combat leader.Would-be readers awaiting David AlanRosenberg's long-promised biography of ArleighBurke will find here an extended precis of thelarger unpublished work, a precis based entirelyon the author's own intensive research.

Essays in Quarterdeck and Bridge will beespecially useful for readers who are not neces-sarily interested in digesting a book-length bio-graphy — though these sketches may well awakena desire to know more — but who want greaterdepth of detail than is provided by the bare-bonessketches in reference works such as the Diction-ary of American Biography. The trick will be inarranging the encounter between this potentialaudience and Quarterdeck and Bridge. Scholarsare well aware of this and the other three Brad-ford volumes. But the more significant audience— the non-specialist reader or the college oruniversity student looking for a succint butcontent-rich overview of, say, the life of RobertF. Stockton — will be likely to discover Harold D.Langley's essay on his subject only in thoselibraries with electronic catalogs which providesubject or keyword access at the individualchapter or essay level to the contents of multiple-topic volumes such as Quarterdeck and Bridge.

Is Quarterdeck and Bridge more than just aseries of excellent individual biographical essaysgathered between the covers of one volume? Inhis preface editor Bradford is rather taciturn abouthis larger purpose. He quotes Admiral JamesCalvert — "Important as ships are, naval history ismade by men" — as "words [that] speak to thepurpose of this book" and says the volume'sessays trace the US Navy's history from theAmerican Revolution to the post-Cold Warpresent. "They tell the Navy's story through thelives of the officers who forged its traditions andstand today as the models against whom theleaders of tomorrow will be measured." [xiii]Whether any overarching insights can be teasedfrom this two-hundred year biographical pan-

Book Reviews 121

orama is, at least in this reviewer's opinion,doubtful. The editor worked with volunteer con-tributors, many of whom had to be cajoled intopart icipation. He did not set a rigidly enforcedagenda that required each author to address, withrespect his or her subject, a prescribed list ofquestions about the officer's life and naval career.The project had no budget which would havepermitted bringing the authors together for anintensive collective discussion of the draft essaysthat might have identified broader themes thatcould have been highlighted in post-conferencerevisions. Quarterdeck and Bridge's essays areuniformly well researched, deftly written, andunfailingly interesting, but collectively they sailas a loosely coordinated task force.

Christopher McKeeIowa City, Iowa

William Laird Clowes. The Royal Navy: A His-tory from the Earliest Times to 1900. 7 vols.,London, 1897; repr. Annapolis: Naval InstitutePress, 1996. xxiv + 698 pp., illustrations, tables,appendix, index. Each volume, US $29.95, Cdn$41.95, paper; ISBN 1-86176-010-8 (Vol. 1), 1-86176-011-6 (II), 1-86176-012-4 (III), 1-86176-013-2 (IV), 1-86176-014-0 (V), 1-86176-015-9(VI), 1-86176-016-7 (VII). Distributed in Canadaby Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, ON.

Reviewing an author who is already dead is aunique experience. The reviewer is allowed acertain freedom, knowing that the risk of a nega-tive review creating a blood feud, or at the veryleast, a controversy, is slight. That said, theobvious question to be asked is whether the workitself has legitimately outlived its author and thematerial worth reprinting. In this case the answeris a resounding "yes." This seven-volume sweepof British naval history takes its readers from thepre-Roman invasion to the end of the nineteenthcentury, where new technologies seemed toensure that naval power remained the most impor-tant military tool in the strategic/foreign policyprocess of the truly great nations. The collectionis not only the best general reference work of itstype, but it also reappears at an oppo rtune time inthe development of the field of naval history andstill manages to raise some interesting questions.That it is also affordable enough to be owned by

every serious maritime scholar is an added bonus.No matter how much things change they

always seem to stay the same. In the generalpreface to his collection, William Laird Clowesmakes much of the fact that Britain's naval his-tory was being neglected by contemporary histor-ians as a major field of study. Not only was navalhistory, with its close relationship to Imperialhistory, being ignored as the world moved to-wards a new century, but a deliberate attempt wasunderway to marginalize the field. Universi tydepartments did not suppo rt such work, andstudents were seen as being deprived of the glorythat was British naval history. Almost one hun-dred years later, the same fears and perceptionspervade the naval history community in Britain,the United States, Canada, Australia and NewZealand. Recent works edited by John Hattendorf(in the one case assisted by James Goldrick),including Mahan is Not Enough, Ubu Sumis?,and Doing Naval History, have been usefulplatforms from which the maritime history com-munity has indulged in navel gazing, the better totry to identify why it is that naval history is anendangered species as a profession. The inabilityto attract first-rate young scholars, to maintainchairs, to obtain funding and to command atten-tion, are all chords of discontent with whichClowes would immediately identify. This leads tothe first interesting question raised by the re-publication of the work: has naval history alwaysbeen a marginal subject, even at the best of times?Clowes answer is, of course, "no."

The second issue that is raised by the depthand breadth of the work, and which is connectedto the first, is one of approach and methodology.Very few of the historians practicing in the fieldof "naval history" today would be capable of re-producing Clowes' achievement. That inability isnot simply the consequence of stingy presses,ignorant editors or the lack of material. Rather,the movement of naval historians over the lastforty years into primarily narrow technologicalniches, battle history or biography, in the searchfor the great weapon, the great battle or the greatman, has caused the profession to marginalizeitself. It has been poised precariously on the edgeof mediocrity and irrelevance, which is somethingwhich Clowes would not allow his history tobecome. There are two reasons for this change.

One is the uniqueness of the Royal Navy and


its role in the development of the British Empire.Clowes understood clearly the linkage betweenthe navy and the Empire. One did not exist with-out the other, so to study the two as separateentities was nonsensical. Since the end of WorldWar II, the refusal to consider imperial history asa legitimate field of study, the unwarrantedemphasis on armies and their roles on the conti-nent during both world wars, and narrow agendasof nationalistic historians have all combined tolead historians foolishly to attempt to separate thenavy from the empire. Worse, national studieshave attempted to explain the development oftheir own nations and navies as phenomena notlinked to the empire and the Royal Navy in anymeaningful way. Thus, naval history dealing withthe period before 1950 has not matured as asensible and understandable field of study inCanada, New Zealand and Australia, because ofthe historians' refusal to accept the realities facedby those dominions with regard to naval powerand empire. A close reading of Clowes wouldprovide some contextual background. More im-portantly, it might also spark a realization that thestudy of British history is a study of maritimepower and empire and, in consequence, that noformer part of that institution can escape thathistorical fact. Clowes' naval history is full ofmaterial linking the British Navy to British soci-ety as a whole. Area studies, military-industrialcomplex discussions, foreign policy planning,strategic and alliance concerns, and party politicsare all found in the work. Such has not alwaysbeen the case with subsequent works which haveattempted to analyze a nation's naval history.

Indeed, in the United States, with its navaltraditions and system firmly tied to the history ofthe Royal Navy, naval history has, for the mostpart, moved away from the Mahanian holism,which Clowes so readily accepted and endorsed.That lack of breadth and depth has hurt the pro-fession and thus it has not been able to join theflow of mainstream historical studies in No rthAmerica. Failing to go beyond great man biogra-phy, usually for self-serving se rv ice reasons, andto embrace the methodological and conceptualadvances made in the study of history generallyin the 1970s and '80s, naval history in the UnitedStates after World War II (with a few notableexceptions) has moved increasingly towards astudy of technology. Such a statistical approach

was recognised by Clowes, who rejected follow-ing the path of historians such as William James(The Naval History of Great Britain, six vols.), asbeing too narrow and unsophisticated a methodol-ogy to demonstrate the impo rtance of navalhistory to a society as a whole. Clowes asks thereader to take an intellectual perspective, not anengineer's, on the needs of and reasons for theuses of maritime power. Those lessons would beusefully revisited by practitioners of the black a rttoday, if there is to be any hope of broadening theappeal of maritime history. Certainly, approach-ing naval history as intellectual history or associal-economic history would do much to rekin-dle interest in the field.

Reading the picture of the role of the BritishNavy in the development of Britain as a nation, aspainted by William Laird Clowes, will prove auseful excercise for any historian. And that iswhat makes it good "maritime" history. It is vitalat this juncture in the development of maritimehistory to have such examples brought back intothe light once more. Indeed, the works of Corbett,Knox, Laughton, the Colombs, Richmond, Tun-stall, Graham, Schurman, could all be re-exam-ined. Even if many of these voices have been lostonce, that is no reason why they should be ig-nored again as the field advances. Indeed, in theera of alliance restructuring and multi-lateralnegotiation, the guidance of such works will beinvaluable for perpetuating the discipline. Forthose reasons the publisher is much to be com-mended for choosing to mark the centennial ofClowes' magisterial study by making it availableonce again, and in an affordable paperback edi-tion for everyone to utilize and enjoy.

Greg KennedyKingston, Ontario

William N. Still, Jr. (ed.). The Queenstown Pa-trol, 1917: The Diary of Commander JosephKnefler Taussig, U.S. Navy. Newport, RI: NavalWar College Press, 1996. xii + 208 pp., photo-graphs, end-map, notes. US $10 (& 2.50 s+h ),paper; ISBN 1-884733-07-7.

In April 1917 the United States declared war onGermany. Less than a month later, a division ofdestroyers arrived in Queenstown (now Cobh),Ireland, the first American warships to be de-

Book Reviews 123

ployed in the war zone. Joseph K. Taussig, aforty-year-old US Navy officer with twenty-twoyears' serv ice experience, commanded the de-stroyers. Taussig recorded the event; indeed, hekept a diary through most of his naval careerwhich lasted through World War II.

Historians often call World War I the forgot-ten war, particularly when referring to Americanpart icipation in it. They have neglected the navyside, though an abundance of unpublished, first-hand, personal papers on US naval activities inthe war lies in repositories scattered throughoutthe United States. The "Queenstown Patrol" diaryof (then) Commander (later Vice Admiral) Taus-sig is one of those previously unpublished manu-scripts. Retired history professor and formerDirector of the Program in Maritime History andNautical Archaeology at East Carolina Universityin Greenville, North Carolina, William N. Still,Jr. edited the diary section that Taussig keptduring his six months on the Queenstown patrol.

Taussig chronicles the operations of the six,sometimes eight, destroyers under his authority,especially the USS Wadsworth, the flagshipdirectly under his command. He recounts howwell American destroyers fared in their fightagainst the submarine enemy during the firstmonths of US belligerency. He comments on theweakness inherent in the "area patrol" tacticsemployed by the British against submarines whenhe first arrived in Ireland. He remarks severaltimes on the success of convoying as the mosteffective method of fighting the submarine. Heeven suffered the embarrassing consequences offriendly fire: "I was sure it was a submarine,sounded general quarters, and ordered the fore-castle gun to commence firing." They had fired onthe British Patrol Boat P-14!

Interspersed throughout the diary areTaussig's caustic remarks on the war. Thus heremarked: "It seems too bad that not even hospitalships are immune from attack anymore...prac-tically all the inte rnational and humane laws havegone by the board so far as the Germans areconcerned." Regarding the poor communicationin the Navy Department he exclaimed: What canwe expect? "Our Navy Department is absolutelyunorganized so far as its duty in connection withcarrying on a war is concerned."

Taussig details his activities on shore and hisconferences with Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly,

who commanded anti-submarine operations in theIrish Sea and all warships (including American)in that command. He also leaves his impressionsof liberty and recreation as well as of the Irish andIreland. Great Britain had put its clocks ahead onehour in the summer as a war measure, but "someof the Irish people are very indignant about it andrefuse to set the clocks ahead." The Irish are "fondof Americans, but despise the English." Oneafternoon he strolled through the Irish country-side and observed: "The vegetable gardensseemed to be flourishing, there were fields ofyoung wheat or oats or rye, lots of cattle andplenty of chickens, ducks, etc., to be seen. Therewere no signs of the country being at war, exceptperhaps an abnormal lot of uniforms."

Taussig describes everyday life in the BritishIsles during wartime, including First Sea Lord,Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, playing with his smallchildren, and Admiral Bayly and Vice AdmiralWilliam S. Sims, commander of US Navy forcesin European waters, washing and drying dishes inBayly's kitchen. Taussig also vents his anger overthe habit of too many American officers hangingout at the Yacht Club bar, and relates severalclashes between Irish males and US bluejackets.

The diary includes orders, telegrams, per-sonal letters and newspaper clippings. It alsooffers the earliest glimpses of American navalparticipation in coalition warfare. After comple-tion of his Queenstown tour, Taussig summed uphis feelings toward Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly andthe Royal Navy on Thanksgiving Day 29 Novem-ber 1917: "It has been a pleasure to se rve underhim directly...There has not been the slightestsign of friction. Our relations have always beencordial. The cooperation between the two navieshas been intimate and successful."

Taussig displayed a clear, detailed, albeitsometimes informal or colloquial writing style inhis war diary; he stands out as an uncommonlyobservant diarist. As J.R. Stark, US Navy RearAdmiral and President of the Naval War Collegein Newport, Rhode Island remarked in the fore-word to The Queenstown Patrol, "Taussig musthave been good company." His diary is absorb-ing. One would hope that eventually the rest of itmight be published.

David Pierce Beat tySackville, New Brunswick


Peter Dickens; Eric Grove (intro.). Narvik; Battlesin the Fjords. "Classics of Naval Literature."London, 1974; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,1 997. xxii + 184 pp., maps, figures, appendices,bibliography, index. US $32.95, Cdn $45.95,cloth; ISBN 1-55750-744-9. Canadian distributor,Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, ON.

The two engagements that took place in theconfined waters of Narvik's fjords in 1940 havereceived scant a ttention from most naval histori-ans and students. Few writers see these battles ashaving much significance in determining thecourse or outcome of World War II. Fortunately,at least one author and publisher decided differ-ently. Published as a volume in the Sea Battles inClose Up series, Dickens' work was hailed as thedefinitive book on its subject when it first ap-peared in 1974. It is this reputation which ex-plains why the Naval Institute Press decided toreprint this work.

The only major change from the originalwork is the addition of a new introduction by EricGrove. He presents an invaluable but brief biogra-phy of Dickens, and discusses the consequencesof the two battles waged in the frigid waters offNarvik's frozen shores in April 1940. Groveconcedes that the Royal Navy's hard-won victor-ies at Narv ik did not prevent the success ofHitler's brazen strike against Norway. However,he also poses the question of what might havehappened had the Kriegsmarine not lost tenvaluable, modern destroyers in these battles. Thisedition also bears the dedication that Dickens hadoriginally intended to use.

Because of its excellent appendices, thisedition dispenses with the practice of insertingtechnical notes in the manuscript. The text is alsosupported by a good number of photographs andmaps. While the former are very pe rt inent, it isunfortunate that the publisher decided againstprinting them on the usual high quality, coatedpaper stock. The maps are very useful and wellpresented. A surprising oversight is the failure toprovide a suggested reading list of modern titlesto compliment Dickens' original bibliography.The only real disappointment is the continuedlack of drawings of the various ships that playeda key role in these battles.

The scope of the information that Dickenswas able to present was quite staggering, and on

this basis alone his work deserves to be read. Hediscusses intelligence failures on both sides, andthe interference of shore-based commanders withthe plans and intentions of the commanders onthe spot. His text provides in-depth coverage onthe Kriegsmarine's inexcusable failure to testcompletely the magnetic torpedoes issued to itsU-boats. This failure negated the major technicaladvantage enjoyed by the Kriegsmarine's de-stroyers — the ability to angle their torpedo tubesin response to sudden changes of course by thetarget. By itself, this testing failure explains theoverwhelming margin of British victory in thesebattles. Otherwise, the Royal Navy's gamble touse the battleship Warspite in the restrictedwaters of the fjords during the Second Battle ofNarv ik could have been disastrous. About theonly weakness in the text is that the author simplycould not discuss the German inv as ion of Norwayin more detail.

Anyone wishing to take up Dickens' gauntletand rewrite the story of these two often over-looked battles will be hard-pressed to do so with-out first consulting this work. This is particularlytrue since many of Dickens' interv iew subjectshave long since joined their former shipmates.

Peter K.H. MispelkampPointe Claire, Québec

Joseph H. Alexander. Storm Landings: EpicAmphibious Battles in the Central Pacific. Anna-polis: Naval Institute Press, 1997. xv + 242 pp.,photographs, maps, figures, tables, appendix,notes, bibliography, index. US $28.95, Cdn$40.50, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-032-0. Canadiandistributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines,ON.

This is an an operational history of seven amphi-bious campaigns that occurred in the CentralPacific during World War II — Tarawa, Saipan,Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa —and of the planning for a culminating amphibiousassault, "Olympic" (the invasion of the JapaneseHome Island of Kyushu), that fortunately did nottake place. These operations were chosen for par-ticular study because they constituted large-scaleinvasions conducted in the face of strong enemyopposition that were self-sustaining and wereprotected by US Navy task forces. Collectively,

Book Reviews 125

they represented the ultimate test of wartimeamphibious doctrine. By analysing these land-ings, the author demonstrates the US Navy'sincreasing competence in this highly-complexform of combat during the final year of the war.

Joseph Alexander is a retired US MarineCorps colonel and prize-winning author of Ut-most Savagery (Naval Institute Press, 1995), adetailed account of the Marines' costly November1943 fight to seize Tarawa Atoll. He is a personwho is therefore well suited to examine twentieth-century amphibious warfare and brings thisfamiliarity to Storm Landings. Just as impor-tantly, his writing s ty le is both lucid in its de-scriptive detail and supple in its narrative flow.

In preparing Storm Landings, Alexanderavoided gathering his facts simply by reading andanalyzing the many secondary accounts nowavailable. Instead, he sought out original docu-mentation, including wartime operation plans andaction repo rts. One of his most fruitful sourcesproved to be the files of material originally as-sembled by Jeter Isely and Philip Crowl for theirpath-breaking history The U.S. Marines andAmphibious War (Princeton Universi ty Press,1951), which now repose in the US Marine CorpsHistorical Center at the Washington Navy Yard.He also was fortunate enough to have intervieweda number of veterans of the landings. And be-cause he sought information on the battles fromthe Japanese perspective as well, Alexander hadpo rt ions of several volumes of the Senshi Sosho(the Japanese war history series) translated for hisuse. As a result, the reader is treated to a fresh andengaging look at island combat in the Pacific.

Specialists will discover a few factual mis-takes apparently caused by the author's depend-ence on unreliable secondary sources for some ofhis information. Thus, Admiral Yamamoto wasnot sent to a watery grave; [24] rather, the planein which he was flying crashed on Bougainville.Similarly, the author's account of the disagree-ment between Admiral King and Admiral Nimitzover the proposed invasion of the Marianas [63-66] is a highly simplified one that inaccuratelyreflects the points at issue. On another matter,Alexander would have had a better understandingof just why Dick Conolly [74] proved to be suchan innovative and successful amphibious com-mander had he read the biographical chapter onConolly in Stephen Howarth's Men Of War:

Great Naval Leaders of World War II (St. Mar-tin's Press, 1993).

Such minor details aside, however, JosephAlexander's concise volume is a valuable contri-bution to our knowledge of warfare in the Pacific.It deserves to find a wide readership among bothmilitary historians and the public at large.

Jeffrey G. BarlowManassas, Virginia

Norman Edward Rourke. War Comes to Alaska:The Dutch Harbor Attack, June 3-4, 1942.Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1997. xiv +166 pp., photographs, figures, maps, illustrations,appendices, bibliography, index. US $12.95,paper; ISBN 1-57249-028-4.

In many ways this book on the Dutch Harborattacks of June 1942 is a frustrating read. Cer-tainly the Japanese air assaults on that isolatedAmerican outpost, launched to coincide with thevery much larger Japanese offensive againstMidway Island in the central Pacific, are the stuffof considerable drama: a forlorn outpost expect-ing invasion by an implacable and ferociouslysuccessful foe with little hope of quick assistance,is relieved instead to find that the enemy hasopted only to batter it with aerial bombs. Unfortu-nately, War Comes to Alaska, plagued by poororganization and lacking much context, does littleto illustrate that story.

The problems become quickly apparent inthe foreword with Norman Edward Rourke'scontention that knowledge of the Aleutian cam-paign has been injured by a concerted Americangovernment effo rt at the time to cover up thedanger posed to the United States by the Japanesepresence in the Aleutians. Based on my owndoctoral research into Canadian-American coop-eration in the Aleutians in World War II, I thinkthat I can safely say that there was no cover up.Indeed, President Franklin Roosevelt mentionedthe Aleutians prominently in a number of 1942press conferences, and any reading of Americanand Canadian newspapers of the day will amplydemonstrate Rourke's error. Moreover, publicopinion surveys undertaken after June 1942reveal that a great many Americans were wellaware of the war in the Aleutians (most could findAlaska and the Aleutians on a world map; con-


versely, far fewer could locate Hawaii). The factthat many World War II histories fail to mentionthe Aleutian campaign at all is likely the productof the fact that many people doubt that the Aleu-tian campaign had any great significance (anarguable point), rather than that there has beenany great cover up of the "truth."

One might argue, in fact, that this book doeslittle to uncover the truth about the Dutch Harborair raids. Although Rourke rather laudably hasincorporated first-person accounts (some of whichare very interesting) from both American andJapanese pa rticipants, the book's organizationleaves much to be desired. The descriptions tendto jump about with little apparent logic, and someof them badly need the se rv ices of a good editorand annotator. On the other hand, the maps andphotographs are often quite informative andinteresting. Oddly, Rourke includes a multi-pageexcerpt from primary Japanese sources withoutproviding a useful context for that material, andgiven that this is a book obviously directed at apopular American audience, it seems quite oddthat those Japanese documents are not translated.

On a strictly nationalist note, Canadianreaders will note unhappily that the Canadianarmy prisoners of war held in Japan after 1942 arewrongly identified as having been captured atSingapore rather than at Hong Kong. In sho rt, ifone wishes to understand the origins and develop-ment of the Aleutian campaign, I am afraid thatthis book will do little to aid that quest. I wouldrecommend as a good beginning FernChandonnet's edited collection of essays, Alaskaat War: The Forgotten War Remembered (1995),and especially its rather extensive bibliography.

Galen Roger PerrasCalgary, Alberta

Kenneth Poolman. The Winning Edge: NavalTechnology in Action, 1939-1945. Annapolis:Naval Institute Press, 1997. xii + 235 pp., photo-graphs, figures, maps, notes, select bibliography,index. US $32.95, Cdn $45.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-687-6. Canadian distributor, VanwellPublishing, St. Catharines, ON.

In this relatively sho rt account of "Naval Tech-nology in Action" in World War II, KennethPoolman aims "to describe in lay terms the devel-

opment of the most impo rtant weapons thatdominated naval warfare from 1939 to 1945, andtheir employment in action." [xii] Unfortunately,either the author or the publisher failed to allowsufficient space to give the topic a full treatment,though it can serve as a useful introduction to thesubject for those interested in the history of navaltechnology (though the price might give all butthe dedicated specialist pause).

That there is much that is useful in this workis undeniable, such as descriptions of welding andits impact on ship construction, an excellentdiagram of the display on earlier versions of RDF(later called radar), another of schnorkel, a verygood account of the war against the magneticmine, and the US Navy's use of radar in thePacific. Other examples include the author's des-criptions of German dive bombing techniques,problems with the fragile undercarriage of theSeafire (the carrier version of the Spitfire), andthe extreme means adopted by kamikaze pilots toavoid radar detection in their missions of self-destruction. Yet readers would be well-advised,when encountering the technical descriptions ofthese systems, to have a specialized dictionary athand, though is it really necessary to know whata "valve heterodyne receiver" is to understandhow asdic (now known as sonar) operated?Similarly, does one have to understand the mean-ing of such expressions as "thermionic silicavalves" or "copper lavaratory spheres" to followthe author's description of early radar? Thank-fully, Poolman only resorts to such technicallanguage occasionally; for the most pa rt, his workis accessible to the lay reader.

Generally, however, the author focuses noton naval technology but on the operations inwhich it played out its role, though these are notstudied in great detail. Rather, such engagementsas the hunt for the Bismarck, the U-boat wolfpacks, the attack on Taranto, the carrier action atMidway, and the struggle for Guadalcanal tend toreceive centre stage, with naval technologyplaying a secondary supporting role. That maywell reflect historical reality, but those interestedin the ebb and flow of scientific and technologicaldevelopment would probably wish to see more inthe way of analysis of such issues. At leastPoolman treats naval technology with an open-mindedness and sophistication often lacking insuch accounts; one will not find exaggerated

Book Reviews 127

claims here that a given device, such as radar,won the war or defeated the enemy in a particularcampaign or battle. Instead, the operational focuswhich constrains the amount of space that couldbe allocated to the technology itself tends to placeit in its proper perspective — how it was used ismore important than its technical specifications.

A few errors have slipped in. The Type XXIU-boat was not in fact introduced at the sametime as schnorkel [94] but a year later, when thewar was almost over. And to harp on a somewhatminor point, Doenitz's orders to cease operationswere issued on 4 May 1945, not 4 March.

To conclude, interested readers will findmuch of value in The Winning Edge, but the bookserves largely as an opening into the subject, andan expensive one at that. Though the author canhardly be blamed for this, prospective buyersshould be warned of the manner in which thebook's length and certainly its price leave itspotential only partially fulfilled.

William RawlingsOttawa, Ontario

Kathleen Broome Williams. Secret Weapon: U.S.High-Frequency Direction Finding in the Battleof the Atlantic. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,1996. xix + 289 pp., illustrations, figures, maps,photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index.US $35, Cdn $48.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-935-2.Canadian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St.Catharines, ON.

This is the story of the ship-borne high-frequencyradio direction finding equipment used by USNavy anti-submarine groups in the offensiveagainst the U-boats in 1943-1945. Such technol-ogy was of enormous importance because itprovided warships with their only means ofdetecting enemy submarines beyond the verylimited range of sonar and radar. Properly traineddirection-finder operators could discriminateground-wave signals, indicating that the U-boatwas within fifty or sixty kilometers, and providean accurate bearing. That was enough for a fastwarship to search in the right direction and atleast force the submarine to submerge and losecontact with a convoy. If two or more Alliedships with direction-finding equipment werepresent, they could triangulate the position of the

U-boat for a concerted hunt.British and Canadian warships began to

achieve results with British-built sets in 1942.The author shows how the good performance ofthe first Royal Canadian Navy warship to befitted with the equipment, the destroyer HMCSRestigouche, impressed American commandersengaged in the Battle of the Atlantic and helpedpromote the direction-finding program within theUS Navy.

The most interesting aspect of the story isthat the US programme, unlike those for sonarand radar, did not feature collaboration with theBritish. Rather, the Americans chose equipmentthat had been developed by French engineersfrom the Paris laboratory of International Tele-phone and Telegraph, the first multinationalelectronics corporation. The author has drawn onthe records of ITT and the memoirs of the Frenchpersonnel to describe pioneering French work inradio navigation during the 1920s and '30s, andthe hair-raising story of how the ITT team es-caped the German occupation in 1940 to maketheir way to the United States. The author makesmuch of the fact that British and US securityauthorities, fearing the French group had beenplanted by the Germans, tried to limit ITT'saccess to essential information and facilities.However, her own account of how the well-connected engineers and executives were able tomake the necessary contacts in the vast, free-wheeling and ill-coordinated mobilization of theUS electronics industry belies her suggestion thatsecurity concerns seriously hindered the work.

The book effectively integrates the history oftechnology and industry with the tactical historyof the Battle of the Atlantic. Ship-borne direction-finding is well-placed in the context of otherintelligence-gathering, weapons and tacticaldevelopments in the Battle of the Atlantic, and inthe context of US equipment development andproduction. Sometimes, however, the thematictreatment of the rich material creates difficulties.There is a good deal of repetition. In some caseskey events and people are not properly introduceduntil after we have encountered them three or fourtimes. Anyone who has done research in Wash-ington will be sympathetic. The diffuse nature ofthe American organization for equipment devel-opment and production is fully reflected in therecords of the many overlapping agencies. The


greatest strength of this book is its firm founda-tion in these large, scattered and difficult collec-tions.

Roger SartyOttawa, Ontario

George R. Lindsey (ed.). No Day Long Enough:Canadian Science in World War II. Toronto:Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 1997. xi+ 274 pp., photographs, background readings,abbreviations. $28 (+ GST), paper; ISBN 0-919769-65-9.

This book is a collection of some fifty briefessays intended to illustrate the vast contributionof Canadian science to the allied victory in WorldWar II. There is an impressive diversity of topics,including vignettes on the National ResearchCouncil, radar, weapons and ammunition, medi-cal research, chemical and biological warfare,operational research and the nuclear program.Most of the authors are wartime scientists, whoprovide recollections of their wartime work.

Unfortunately, too many too brief essays,with an average length of only three pages,provide little information of any historical value.What is provided is a deliberate attempt to recastthe myth of Canadian wartime scientific achieve-ment against what is perceived as an assault by"revisionist historians," whom the members of thebook's committee admit they do not admire. Inthe introduction historians are condemned be-cause their "research into affairs more than about50 years old can only be based on archival re-cords, usually offering poor testimony to theatmosphere of the time." [4] However, as anycompetent historians could have informed thebook's editorial committee, memories of eventsmore than half a century old are far more suspectthan a careful reading of historical documents.This work is a classic reconfirmation of the axiomabout the dangers of relying solely on uncriticalselective memory to write history.

As a result, for those interested in learningabout Canada's scientific contribution to thenaval war, this work provides nothing new and isfilled not so much with gross inaccuracies, butgross sins of omission. The best example of thisis the account of naval radar research during thewar. The technically successful, but operationally

next-to-useless SW 1 C radar is not mentioned.This set was the principal ship-based radar fromlate 1941 to the end of 1942. Nor is there mentionof the two major naval shortwave radar projectsthat completely failed, the American/ Canadianhybrid RX/U and the all-Canadian RX/C. Giventhat the RCN was relying on these sets to end itsgrave deficiencies in centimetric radar during acrucial period in the Battle of the Atlantic, this isa serious oversight. Also not mentioned is theCanadian version of the ASV Mark II radar,which played a vital role in convoy defencebefore shorter wavelength aircraft sets becameavailable. Instead, attention is given to the devel-opment of the type 268 radar, a set built for andunder the supervision of the British Admiralty.The set was a technological triumph, but it wasready too late to see extensive se rv ice in the war.The RCN refused to use the type 268, havingalready abandoned unreliable Canadian radar forAmerican equipment like the SU 3-centimetre set.

Most of the rest of the section on the scien-tific contribution to the RCN is excerpted frommuch earlier works, principally Wilfrid Eggle-ston's 1950 publication, Scientists at War. Notonly is this not original, but it ignores the muchmore extensive accounts in Zimmerman's GreatNaval Battle of Ottawa, and the various works byMilner.

Overall this work provides little new infor-mation and what is provided is uncritically pre-sented. By ignoring the work of historians whohave written on the scientific war, a goldenopportunity has been missed to add to an impres-sive body of historical writing that is not in theleast bit revisionary. After all, historians are wellaware that the principal "atmosphere of the time"was the desire to defeat the Axis powers. Thatsometimes Canadian effo rts to contribute to thescientific war failed is a fact, not a matter ofrevisionary opinion. What is subject to interpreta-tion is the causes for these failures, which were,more often than not, outside of the control of andbeyond the knowledge of the scientists. For it canonly be by performance in battle that the successor failure of a new weapon system can be judgedin times of war.

David ZimmermanVictoria, British Columbia

Book Reviews 129

Clay Blair. Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters,1939-1942. New York: Random House, 1996xxxi + 809 pp., maps, photographs, appendices,indices. US $40, Cdn $56, cloth; ISBN 0-394-58839-8.

Clay Blair, a former US Navy submariner, is bestknown as the author of Silent Victory, an accountof the American submarine war against Japan inthe Pacific. In this book and a forthcoming se-cond volume he tells the story of the GermanU-boat war in the Atlantic in a style aimed at botha scholarly and a popular audience. Unfortunatelythe lack of footnotes seriously undermines itsclaim of being an authoritative and definitivehistory (the bibliography will appear in the se-cond volume but until then is available on Ran-dom House's web-site).

It is impossible to do justice to the scope ofthis book in a brief review, for it is clearly theproduct of a massive amount of research. Blairdescribes the U-boat war in a level of detail as yetunattempted by historians: virtually every U-boatpatrol is included and the more notable patrolsand convoy battles are described in depth. Theroles of air power, shipbuilding, code-breaking,and technological advances are thoroughly dis-cussed; the descriptions of German torpedodefects and Allied radar development are particu-larly well done. Though the detail is sometimesoverwhelming, even specialists will find some-thing new here. Continuing the trend of recenthistoriography of the Battle of the Atlantic, Blairhas made an effo rt to accord the Royal CanadianNavy its proper place in the story and is familiarwith the work of Canadian historians. For exam-ple, this is one of the few accounts that acknow-ledges that the main blow of Operation Drumbeatfell in Canadian not American waters. Mosthistorians have treated Drumbeat, the surpriseU-boat attack in the western hemisphere in Janu-ary 1942, exclusively as an attack on Americanshipping. On the other hand, repeated referencesto Canadian escorts as "green" or "inexperienced"leave the reader sometimes wondering whether heis really just painting all Canadian warships withthe same brush.

If there is an underlying thesis in the book, itis that the threat posed by German U-boats hasbeen overemphasized by German propagandistsand Allied historians — hardly an original argu-

ment. In making it he sometimes goes too far,claiming that the U-boat war was a draw until theend of 1941. The numbers, however, suggest aGerman victory to that date: forty-nine U-boatslost in exchange for twenty-eight Allied warshipsand 1,124 merchant ships of 5.3 million tons.

Blair is not without his share of axes togrind. National and serv ice perspectives haveshaped the historiography of the Battle of theAtlantic and this is no exception. The author isparticularly harsh in his condemnation of Britishhistorians and others who have criticized AdmiralErnest King, Commander-in-Chief of the USNavy, for being unprepared to convoy merchantships in American waters in early 1942. In theweakest part of the book, Blair denounces Chur-chill, Roosevelt, George Marshall (Chief of Staffof the US Army), and anyone else critical ofKing. Defending the US Navy against charges ofinactivity, he argues that King took early steps toset up coastal convoys between Halifax andBoston and Halifax and Trinidad, although bothof these routes used Canadian escorts and werenot really American initiatives. Much of what isbecoming known as "the convoy controversy"revolves around the allocation of US escorts.King's critics allege that he withdrew destroyersfrom the North Atlantic theatre in the spring of1942 (reducing the US contribution from five offourteen escort groups to one of eleven) for theJapanese war. In King's defence, Blair proves thatmany of the destroyers went to the US AtlanticFleet and not the Pacific Ocean, where theyserved with the fleet or escorted troop convoys, atask which absorbed scores of destroyers. Heargues that troop escort was as vital as the protec-tion of merchant shipping and that British histori-ans have not understood the US Navy policy ofproviding massive escort for troop convoys. Onemight argue, however, that the limited surfacespeed of the U-boats posed little risk to fast troopconvoys which as a result required only a tokenescort (which was all the Royal Navy was willingto provide). Still, Blair has put the often over-looked troop convoys back into the Atlantic storyand provided valuable data about the numbersand deployment of US destroyers.

Despite these shortcomings, specialists willfind Hitler's U-boat War a valuable and thor-oughly researched reference work, making thelack of footnotes all the more regrettable. For


price and size, however, those with a more casualinterest in the Battle of the Atlantic will be betterserved by John Terraine's one-volume survey.

Robert FisherNepean, Ontario

Philip Kaplan and Jack Currie. Wolfpack: U-Boats At War 1939-1945. London: Aurum Press,1 997. 240 pp., photographs (b+w, colour), illus-trations, figures, maps, glossary, bibliography,index. £19.95, cloth; ISBN 1-85410-451-9.

Wolfpack is a notably well-researched book thatgoes a long away towards explaining why aparticular mystique has grown around the GermanNavy's submarine serv ice. Authors Kaplan andCurrie are authoritative military historians whoapproach the subject of U-boats from a variety ofangles — crews, strategy, vessels, equipment,operations — and so manage to add some freshinsights to the popular lore. Just as interesting isthe account of how Allied naval and air forcesgradually developed anti-submarine methods thatdefeated the U-boats in the end.

Kaplan and Currie concentrate mainly onWorld War II, but there is a brief preamble toprovide historical perspective (where we encoun-ter a rare lapse of historical accuracy when theyassert that "the first offensive action came in1801...in New York Harbor during the AmericanWar of Independence." [18]) They present amassive volume of details coherently by groupingthem in logically-related chapters. Fittingly, thehuman element is placed first, examining thecomposition of typical U-boat crews. Amongseveral eye-openers revealed by the authors is thefact that U-boat crews were not all volunteers.Unlike most other elite fighting formations, theU-bootwaffe included a large propo rt ion of menwho were conscripted into their demanding anddangerous specialty. However, once "in," theydeveloped a tremendous unit pride, and servedwith extraordinary skill and tenacity.

It might be difficult even now, though, for amerchant mariner to share quite the same warmglow of admiration felt by numerous present-dayfans of U-boat aces. After all, the "wolfpacks"preyed mostly on civilian tankers and freighters,and as the authors say of merchant ship sinkings,the U-boat commanders "simply wanted to find

them, torpedo them, and leave them and theircargoes at the bottom of the sea; if their crewswent down with them, c'est la gue rre." [58]

That they were superbly equipped for the jobof ship-killing is well-catalogued in this book,greatly enhanced by the accompanying illustra-tions — 115 of them in colour, plus 130 black andwhite photographs. The photos that were takenduring wartime patrols are particularly striking,conveying better than any words the grim serv iceconditions and strength of character required ofthese implacable undersea-dogs.

The U-boats' construction and constantre-designs reflected numerous rapid advancesdiscovered through battle experience and scien-tific developments. Weapons and convoy-huntingtactics were changed and improved continually tokeep honing the effectiveness of what was poten-tially Hitler's most dangerous weapon. PrimeMinister Winston Churchill himself later admit-ted, "The only thing that ever really frightened meduring the war was the U-boat peril."

German submarines sank 2,603 Alliedmerchant ships and 175 naval vessels. They alsotook the lives of 30,246 merchant seamen — oneout of every four who went to sea. Not that it wasa one-sided slaughter. By war's end, the U-boot-waffe had lost 27,491 sailors killed, out of a totalof 39,000 in action. One's only regret is that thosebrave and dedicated men could not have served insome nobler cause than Nazidom.

Sidney AllinsonVictoria, British Columbia

Jurgen Rohwer. Allied Submarine Attacks ofWorld War Two: European Theatre of Opera-tions, 1939-1945. London: Greenhill Books andAnnapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997. 252 pp.,indices. US $39.95, Cdn $55.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-038-X. Canadian distributor for GreenhillBooks, Black Cat Books, Cobourg, ON.

Whenever mention is made of submarine attacksin World War II, most think immediately of thesavage battles between the Allies and German U-boats in the Atlantic, or US submarine e fforts inthe Pacific. This latest book by Jurgen Rohwer isan extensively researched assessment of anentirely different aspect of submarine warfare, thedetermined effo rts of Allied submarines to de-

Book Reviews 131

stroy Axis shipping. As the title indicates, almostall the attacks covered are near Europe, but thereis one page that details the efforts of Sovietsubmarines against the Japanese in August 1945,in the short interval between the USSR's declara-tion of war and Japan's final defeat.

The book is structured to facilitate locatingspecific incidents. There are indices that allowindividual ships, submarines or commandingofficers to be looked up. The body of the book isdivided geographically, starting with Arcticwaters, then Norway, No rth Sea and Biscay, nextthe Baltic, followed by the Black Sea, the Medi-terranean with the brief final chapter devoted tothe Pacific. The preponderance of activity in theMediterranean can perhaps be deduced by notingthat almost half the book is set aside for the mid-dle sea. However, as there are no statistical sum-maries, this assessment would be rather difficultto suppo rt based solely on the information pro-vided as it is in the book, without further analysis.

Each chapter in the book proceeds chrono-logically through the attacks in each area withinformation provided in sixteen columns, oftenaugmented by detailed footnotes at the bottom ofthe page. The information includes date and timeof the start of the attack, nationality and name ofthe submarine, the intended target, and reportedand actual results of the attack. As is to be ex-pected, not all of the information is available forevery event, but reasons for the absence of infor-mation or suggestions as to why the informationhas not come to light are usually included. Thecomprehensive effo rt of the author to determineall possible information about each attack is clearthroughout the book, and his hope that all thosenoting errors or omissions will contact him isforthrightly stated in the introduction.

This book is not suitable for light reading,but it provides an ideal reference tool for thosewishing to determine the details of specific ac-tions. The lack of any summary tables or generalanalysis means that there is little here for generalreaders, but specialists should be delighted thatProfessor Rohwer has once again turned hisformidable research talents to detailing the as-pects of another port ion of the naval history ofWorld War II.

D.M. McLeanOrleans, Ontario

Roger Hayward. The Fleet Air Arm in Camera,1912-1996: Archive Photographs from the PublicRecord Office and the Fleet Air Arm Museum.Stroud, Gloucs.: Sutton Publishing, in associationwith the Public Record Office, 1996. xii + 180pp., photographs, index. £18.99, US $33.95,cloth; ISBN 0-7509-1254-5. No rth American dis-tributor, Books International Inc., Herndon, VA.

This sleek volume, in essence, is an evidentiarysampler. Its purpose is to entice readers intoexploration of the apparently massive Fleet AirArm photographic collection held by the PublicRecord Office. Published under the aegis of thatinstitution, the book also includes images housedin the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.Altogether, some 240 beautifully reproducedphotographs offer a snapshot history of the FAAfrom its first ventures in 1912 to the completionof the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean in 1996.Author Roger Hayward, while necessarily highlyselective, has succeeded in capturing that multi-faceted history in a generally balanced and coher-ent way. Accordingly, few images stand com-pletely alone. They are, instead, grouped intopictorial vignettes which follow a loosely chrono-logical line. Subject matter, moreover, is appro-priately diverse. Vessels, not surprisingly, holdpride of place. Striking, wide-angle views ofFurious (1917), Eagle (1920) and Ark Royal(1960s) drive home, faster than mere words, theevolution from modified ship of the line to fullydedicated carrier. Here, an unstated but obvioussubtheme is the Royal Navy's reliance on escortand light fleet car riers in contrast with the Ameri-can and Japanese development of larger vesselsbefore and during World War Il. As for aircraft,Hayward is careful to represent not only theglamorous, but also some of the more exotic, ifawkward-looking, types which saw serv ice fromthe box-kite to the jet age. Similarly, maintenanceunits and land-based elements receive amplecoverage. Thus, airfields from Gibraltar to KaiTak form part of this visual record along withcatapult systems, armoured cars and se rv ice bays.Given the limits of space available to him, Hay-ward has produced a well-rounded pictorialhistory of a complex and colourful subject.

The numerous photo essays are greatlyenhanced by generally precise and well-phrasedcaptions. Just occasionally, one or two of these


might benefit from more detail. Similarly, somecrowded photographs might usefully have beenenlarged. Thus, the shot of Columbo Harbour in1942 [78] is described as portraying several spe-cific ships, but the image is so small and thecaption so vague that only an expe rt eye coulddistinguish one vessel from another. A few otherphotographs appear without precise dates, such asthose of Ark Royal. [157-8] Fortunately, suchproblems are rare in an otherwise carefully docu-mented book. There are, however, some curiousomissions. Thus, crew and prominent individualsreceive far less attention than equipment. Equally,it seems odd that no direct references to the muchstoried Taranto raid are made. Perhaps the authorfelt that episode to be so well covered elsewhereas to seem hackneyed in a work as original asthis. In any event, it is greatly to his credit thatHayward presents the history of the FAA "wartsand all." Accordingly, ill-starred ventures, such asthe disastrous attack on the battlecruiserSharnhorst , stand alongside photo memorials to moresuccessful undertakings. Brilliant technologicalinnovations are recorded, but so too are notableflops, such as the scheme to transpo rt paratroop-ers in claustrophobic one-man pods under thewings of a Fairey Barracuda! [97]

Taken as a whole, all that is truly lacking inthis book is an adequate introduction. Far toomuch of the current one is given over to direc-tions as how best to contact and use the PRO.This may serve the central purpose of those whoproduced the work but it does little to guide themerely curious potential buyer into the historybehind the photographs which follow. The lack ofreference to works which could augment contex-tual appreciation only compounds this problem.It remains, therefore, difficult to determine whothe intended readership of this book might be.

James G. GreenleeCorner Brook, Newfoundland

Roderick Macdonald. The Figurehead. A Story ofConflict and Loyalty at Sea in World War II.Bishop Auckland, Durham The Pentland Press,1993. xxi + 201 pp, maps, pen and ink illustra-tions, notes, index. £14.50, cloth; ISBN 1-85821-056-9.

This excellent small personal history of the early

war days, mostly describing the author's sixteenmonths in the rather out-dated destroyer Fortune,has two Canadian connections: Fortune in mid-war became HMCS Saskatchewan, and in award-ing only three "Oscars" for contributions towinning the Battle of the Atlantic (in which heparticipated) the Admiral awards one to the RoyalCanadian Navy "which overcame exceptionalmaterial and training deficiencies, and much stickfrom its American and British Allies.... until itwas carrying the main burden of the mid-Atlanticwar." [187] It is surely an unusually perceptiveremark!

After joining the Royal Navy at seventeen in1 939 and his normal Big Ship training time,Macdonald was appointed to Fortune in October1941 as an inexperienced Sub-Lieutenant. He hadan exciting life in her for almost a year and a half,on some hor rendous Mediterranean convoys, oneof which from Alexandria was forced to turn backand during which her Engineer Officer was killed.From the Med she passed to the Indian Ocean forfleet support as the Japanese advanced, thenconvoying valuable freighters as an anti-sub-marine and anti-air escort between South A fr ica,Madagascar, Bombay and Ceylon — "a warriorfor the working day."

Macdonald is a witty raconteur, hanging thetale on many stories of the ship's normal dailyduties and her seamen, as he rose in responsibili-ties to navigator and even acting 1st Lieutenant,all without benefit of any courses except his basicSub's courses. His main continuing concern wasthe ship's problems with a distinctly odd com-manding officer — one who was withdrawn,morose, commanded "by the book" and thereforelacked any sensitivity or sympathy with the livesand difficulties of his officers and men under warconditions, and who exploded in wrath at everyuntoward event. The author attributes his appoint-ment to the desperate shortage of command-qualified officers. When officers went off sick, noreplacement could be requested — for severalmonths the ship served with only two Lieute-nants, a RIN Brahmin Sub Lieutenant, a worldlySurgeon Lieutenant medical officer, one warrantofficer and the Chief Engine Room Artificer asengineer officer. When it was found the shipwould only answer her helm in calm waters or byviolent use of her screws, the captain refusedeven to ask for a diver's inspection of the rudder,

Book Reviews 133

presumably in case higher command mightsuspect his ship was less than fully competent. Itwas only when she was almost run down whileescorting the liner Aquitania that he consented, tofind there was only the framework of a rudder leftafter a near-miss bombing had blown off theplating during her final duty in the Med.

Macdonald, later to be Chief of Staff toCommander Naval forces Southern Europe inNATO, and now Vice Admiral Sir RoderickMacdonald, Chieftain of the Isle of Skye and anacknowledged painter, coped both with his COand a growing number of responsibilities, learn-ing much, observing with humour his obviouslyfavourite character, Jolly Jack, the naval back-bone upon which all else eventually depended,and who he essentially commanded with wisdomand common sense.

Macdonald's story ends with his appoint-ment elsewhere in February 1943. There are a fewobvious spelling errors that should have beencaught, but the story tells well of the hectic earlydays when all was too little, and funeral drill hada higher priority on Subs' courses than anti-submarine tactics or doctrine. Although the bookruns to some two hundred pages, there is reallyonly about two-thirds of that in text, for most ofthe pages are profusely and excellently illustratedby Macdonald's pen-and-ink sketches of ships,seamen, the harbours and activities. All thismakes the book well worth the modest price.

Fraser M. McKeeMarkdale, Ontario

Edwin E. Moïse. Tonkin Gulf and the Escalationof the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill and London:Universi ty of North Carolina Press, 1996. xx +304 pp., maps, figures, notes, bibliography,index. US $34.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8078-2300-7.Distributed in Canada by Scholarly Book Ser-vices, Toronto, ON.

Conspiracy theories, under the guise of seekingtruth, more often dog proper historical analysis.What their proponents fail to appreciate is thatany complex set of circumstances that is con-structed to achieve a particular purpose would, inactual practice, prove far too difficult to organizeand could easily be undone. The reverse is farmore likely: a sequence of accidental events can

combine to create the most ghastly of mistakes.This is particularly true of naval warfare, with itsmyriad factors of men, machines and the environ-ment. Clausewitz called it "friction," others, the"fog of war" or, less charitably, "Murphy's law."

And that is precisely the point of this book.During the night of 4 August 1964, the US Navydestroyers Maddox and Turner Joy, patrolling inthe Tonkin Gulf some sixty miles off the No rthVietnamese coast, reported that they were underattack by torpedo boats. Neither ship was dam-aged, but this was the second attack in as manydays. Mere hours later, President Johnson orderedthe first US airstrikes against North Vietnam. On7 August, Congress passed the so-called TonkinGulf Resolution, giving the President authority totake "all necessary measures...to prevent furtheraggression." For over thirty years a debate hasensued: anti-war sympathizers charge that theattack was orchestrated as a pretext for Americanescalation in Vietnam, while suppo rters havestood by the legitimacy of the government's claimto the right of self defence. Volumes have beenwritten to establish or debunk the conspiracy.Moïse is the first to wage into the fray withMurphy at his side.

On the basis of exhaustive research compris-ing recently declassified American documents,access for the first time to Vietnamese sources,and interv iews with part icipants from both sides,Moïse concludes that the attack on Maddox andTurner Joy never happened. This is not to embarkon an entirely new conspiracy purporting yetanother US government cover-up. Rather, hecontends that the original repo rt was a genuinemistake. In the fog of war, the crews honestlybelieved that they had been attacked, when inreality no enemy were anywhere in the area. Ahalf-million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americanlives later, this surely rates well up the list ofghastly mistakes.

Moïse candidly admits that relations betweenWashington and Hanoi had deteriorated to suchan extent that if the repo rts from the Tonkin Gulfhad not led to the US escalation, something elsewould have done so within a few months. Instead,"profoundly disturbed by the extent to which theappearance of this incident differed from itsreality," [xii] he has found it instructive to dissectthe human frailties, the limitations of technology,and the vagaries of weather and the sea that


combined to generate so powerful and lasting anillusion.

In so doing, he takes the reader on a fascinat-ing tour inside the various layers of two nationson a collision course to war. Full chapters aredevoted to US covert operations and thoughts ofescalation in the summer of 1964, the institutionof the Tonkin Gulf patrols, in-depth analysis ofthe incidents on each of 2 August (genuine) and4 August (phantom), discussions of the evidencefrom the destroyers as well as from other sources(including "the problem of excited witnesses"),the immediate retaliation, and finally the inevita-ble further escalation.

Of particular interest to readers of this jour-nal should be his analysis of the workings of adestroyer task unit of the mid-1960s United StatesNavy. On matters as diverse as abnormal atmos-pheric conditions, radar plotting and gun-laying,and tactics to counter patrol boat torpedo attacks,Moïse has done his research, and portrays it inaccessible language. What transpires is a less thaninspiring, but all too real, account of military(un)-preparedness.

This reviewer — not an avid student of theUS involvement in Vietnam — must admit tohaving been perplexed over the years at how theworld's most advanced and powerful navy couldhave been surprised by a Third World force, andthat such a shallow pretext could set a cataclysmin motion. My curiosity now is satisfied. Moïseseparates fact from fiction in an absorbing andentirely plausible account of what actually trans-pired in August 1964.

Richard H. GimblettBlackburn Hamlet, Ontario

Nick Barker. Beyond Endurance: An Epic ofWhitehall and the South Atlantic Conflict. Lon-don: Leo Cooper, 1997. xviii + 254 pp., maps,photographs, index. £19.95, cloth; ISBN 0-85052-522-5.

Nick Barker commanded HMS Endurance, theRoyal Navy's Antarctic survey ship and Britain'ssole naval presence in the South Atlantic justprior to, and during, the Falkland Islands War.This book is more than just his remembrance ofthat period, it is also an exposition of his deeplyheld views as to who is at fault for having al-

lowed Britain to be caught by surprise by theArgentine invasion of the Falklands in April1982.

More than anything, Barker blames JohnNotes 1981 Defence White Paper for giving theArgentine junta the green light to invade theFalkland Islands. In attempting to cut Britishdefence expenditure, The White Paper bound thenavy's role more tightly to the protection ofNATO waterways than any previous defencestatement. As a result a host of naval amphibiouscapabilities were cut and among the ships to bepaid off was HMS Endurance.

Barker learned of this decision shortly aftersailing back to England at the end of the 1980-81season in the South Atlantic. Immediately, hebegan to lobby his superiors in an attempt to savehis ship. As it became clear that such actionsalone would not save what he affectionately callsthe Red Plum, Barker engaged in a wider, andmore dubious, lobbying campaign. In the courseof this campaign he became involved with lobbygroups and even met with the Opposition peerLord Shackleton. At the time his actions sparkeda great deal of controversy and undoubtedly theyaffected his career after the war. Much of thisbook is dedicated to defending his actions and toshowing that those who believed he was activelyconspiring against the government were wrong.

Nevertheless, the ultimate fate of his lobby-ing efforts had not been decided when, in the latefall 1981, Barker and the crew of the Endurancesailed back to the South Atlantic for anotherseason of supporting the British presence in theFalkland Islands and the Antarctic. It was overthe next several months that Barker came to theconclusion that some kind of military action bythe Argentines against the Falklands was immi-nent. Although he sent back several warnings toLondon, none of these was taken seriously by theForeign and Commonwealth Office, which paidgreater attention to the more upbeat repo rts of theBritish Embassy in Buenos Aires, headed byAnthony Williams. Barker attributes this indiffer-ence to his reporting in large measure to the factthat he had earlier angered Whitehall through hisefforts to prevent the scrapping of Endurance.

When, in fact, the Argentines did capture theFalklands in April 1982, Endurance became thesole British presence in the South Atlantic. A cat-and-mouse game ensued as Barker and his crew

Book Reviews 135

attempted to evade Argentine effo rts to track andsink Endurance. The strength of the book lies inthis section as Barker recounts the command andleadership difficulties of keeping a lonely stationin such distant and foreboding waters. Thismeshes well with some of his earlier chapterswhich explained Endurance's work in the SouthAtlantic and the challenges which the crew con-stantly faced in this inhospitable environment.

The book could undeniably have done withtighter editing as many passages are confusinglywritten, reading more like a stream of conscious-ness than a structured argument. Nevertheless, Iwould recommend it for those with a generalinterest in the Royal Navy or the Falklands War.

Orest BabijKingston, Ontario

James P. Delgado. Ghost Fleet: The Sunken Shipsof Bikini Atoll. Honolulu: University of Hawai'iPress, 1996. x + 204 pp., maps, photographs(b+w, colour), figures, illustrations, notes, bibli-ography, index. US$31.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8248-1864-4; $21.95, paper; ISBN 0-8248-1868-7.

It is a safe assumption that the readers of TNM/LMN have had the spectre of nuclear war hover-ing over them most of their lives. The mushroomcloud is an image familiar to us all — as is that bitof film where one engulfs a small fleet of ships.That was the atomic testing performed by theUnited States at Bikini Atoll, and in Ghost FleetCNRS member James Delgado traces the story ofthose now abhorrent experiments.

Despite its subtitle, this is not a "diver'sguide" to the wrecks at Bikini. It is primarily ahistory of the 1946 Operation CROSSROADS —the two explosions "Able" and "Baker" and thecancelled "Charlie." The mostly futile attempts atdealing with the radioactive hulks have beensummarised, and the sad fate of the Bikini island-ers has not been overlooked. Despite the emotion-ally sensitive nature of the material, the authorhas written a well-balanced account, one that willbe enjoyed by the general public. Reference notesare unobtrusive, tucked away in the back, wherethey are available to the serious researcher, butwhere they are less likely to frighten off theaverage reader.

Once past the history, Delgado narrates his

experiences diving the wrecks. His descriptionswill ring true to any diver, and make it easy topicture the carnage caused by the atomic blasts.Most of the ships Delgado visited rate only a fewparagraphs — two of the most interesting, battle-ship Arkansas and carrier Saratoga, get the mostspace. The treatment of the la tter, a famousveteran of the Pacific campaign, is particularlygood. Loaded with aircraft and ordnance, she wasabout three hundred metres from the "Baker" blast— and the gallant vessel took almost eight hoursbefore she finally sank. Now, battered and crum-pled, she sits upright in about 180 feet of water.

The author spends some time contrasting thetreatment given to the former enemy ships: theGerman Prinz Eugen (now upside-down in theshallows off Kwajalein) and the Japanese Sakawaand battleship Nagato. The Prinz Eugen seems tohave been treated with respect.. The Japaneseships, however, arrived in Bikini with corpsesstill on board. Moreover, few test instrumentswere installed on them, and little scientific atten-tion was paid to their sinking. Delgado makes thecase that the presence of the Japanese ships wasa symbolic gesture, and even goes so far as to saythat their placing near the centre of the blasts wasa "racist act." [154]

The illustrations are good: period photo-graphs of the ships; views of the setup ph ases; theblasts themselves, and of course underwaterviews from the 1940s as well as today. It wasundoubtably cost which precluded having morecolour photographs. Sketches depict Saratogaand Prinz Eugen as they lie on the bottom.

Overall, this is a very good book. All that ismissing is an appendix listing all the ships whichwere used as targets in the test, and their ultimatefates — over ninety ships were involved. BikiniAtoll is now opening up to the tourist — andhaving finished reading Ghost Fleet, this diver isnow trying to figure out a means of squeezing hisbudget to be able to get there!

Safety note: the wrecks of Bikini Atoll lay atdepths much deeper than those for which the"spo rts" diver is usually qualified. It must bestressed that anyone contemplating such a seriesof dives must be an experienced diver with theappropriate training, skills and equipment.

William SchleihaufPierrefonds, Quebec