The Peripatetic Reviewer
by Edward Weeks
THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA: THE NORTHERN VOYAGES by Samuel Eliot Morison Oxford University Press, $15.00
Unlike Hakluyt, whose famous Voyages was such a spur to British seafarers, Samuel Eliot Morison has actively confronted the peril and power of the sea he writes about. In preparation for his biography of Columbus, he navigated a sailing vessel of comparable tonnage, retracing from Europe the three voyages of the great discoverer. In his fourteenvolume history of the American Navy in World War II he came in personal touch with more hazard and valor than most writers will ever know; and now in writing what may prove to be his magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, he is in brilliant command of his experience and his scholarship.
Volume I, The Northern Voyages, begins with the philosophers, geographers like Ptolemy, and the seafarers of the ancient world, who laid a speculative and scientific basis for the discoveries which followed in the Middle Ages. The narrative takes hold with the seagoing monks of Ireland, and notably St. Brendan, who sailed west in their curraghs, skincovered boats, in search of islands where they might build their monasteries isolated from the world and the other sex.
Then came the Norsemen, not the Vikings in their long boats, but the more pacific-minded Norse settlers, men and women leaving Scandinavia for the fabulous lands to the west. They gradually took over the settlements in Iceland, and under Eric the Red and his son, Leif Ericsson, they ventured still further across the uncharted water, navigating with a forked stick to found and maintain their new colony on Greenland. The Admiral analyzes the sagas and penetrates a dozen myths before finally locating the Norse settlement on the Wonder Strands, the incredible thirtymile beach of white sand, soft marsh, and high woods in Labrador.
The sovereignty of the sea passed from Scandinavia to Southern Europe; and with Venice in decline, it was Columbus from Genoa and the great Portuguese navigators who took up the hazard of finding a passage to Cathay. Only after Spain had subdivided the New World with Portugal did Henry VII and Henry VIII of England get into the competition; and then by hiring a Genoese navigator, John Cabot. But this time the European rivalry for islands, for mainland territory, and for fishing grounds was fierce. The mapmakers got into it, and when the King of Portugal began awarding his favorites the monopoly of islands that had never been discovered and did not exist, the maps became studded with fictitious names. The great voyages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were those of Cabot and Verrazzano, Cabot making an incredibly accurate round trip in a cockleshell with a crew of twenty-two, and Verrazzano coasting from Cape Fear to the barrier beach of Pamlico Sound in search of the opening that would lead him to China. I am particularly interested in Cartier’s voyages to Canada and Gilbert’s and Raleigh’s fateful expeditions to the South.
In this mellow book Morison blends pungent insight as a historian and extraordinary knowledge as a navigator, familiarity with the ancient sagas and graphic understanding of the dangers which the mariners encountered. He threads his way through the myths and national rivalries with a strong hand and salty wit. He believes that the Yale Vinland map is suspect and explains why. His scholarship is never forbidding, for throughout the narrative he is speaking as a twentiethcentury admiral of the ocean sea, urbane, good-humored, experienced, and acute in his reading of human nature. The notes are spicy and persuasive, the maps and illustrations profuse.
THE STREAM
by Robert Murphy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.95
In a novel about nature, Robert Murphy has depicted a two-thousand-acre tract in the Pocono Mountains which had been held since the beginning of this century by a club of ten members. Through this wooded wilderness flowed a narrow stream the Dutch had called the Fishkill: there were thirteen major rock dams in its course, two low waterfalls, a bridge to provide access to the heavily shadowed Bridge Pool, and a number of feeder brooks. Here the members came on weekends to fish for trout in the spring, or to hunt for grouse and woodcock in the autumn, and here one of their number, Jerry Ohlmstead, retired from business after his wife’s death. He was fifty-two when she died, and in his loneliness he found consolation in walking the trails in any season, observing the wildlife, and on guard against the trouble that always seemed to threaten from the outside.
The story begins in the spring when, hibernation over, the bear and her cubs, the raccoon, the varmints, the insects, the deer, and the birds are making the woods come alive. Ohlmstead is a protective naturalist who patrols the tract at odd hours on the outlook for Slattery, the poacher. But this year there are signs that make him uneasy: he comes upon a survey crew laying out a pipeline uncomfortably close to the club’s property; a little later, wading his favorite pool, he is startled by an airplane flying low, trailing a pale cloud of spray which can bode no good for the underwater life. He hears of a new road that will bring more trippers to the state park a couple of miles above their line. Remorselessly the evidence accumulates that their little enclave, put together by men who took delight in nature, is seriously in jeopardy.
The tract was never lovelier than that summer. Ohlmstead’s encounter with the forest lovers under a full moon is a delightful piece of comedy; so is his housekeeper’s account of how the village rummy, George Simpson, broke his leg. Such personal interludes and such vignettes as the secret hunting of the goshawk or the preening of a seven-year-old buck in his laurel thicket lull one’s appreciation of this guarded place, until the fall hurricane sweeps down to add its destruction to what the engineers have done.
The Stream, so well illustrated by Bob Hines, is not a defense of the right to privacy, though that of course is involved; it is an eloquent, indignant affirmation that such sanctuaries as this small stream in Penn’s Woods preserve a unique American ecology, and that to destroy it systematically, as we are doing in the name of progress, is to denude this magnificent country for those who come after.
PROMISES TO KEEP: MY YEARS IN PUBLIC LIFE, 1941 - 1969 by Chester Bowles Harper & Row, $12.95
In July of 1943, after eighteen intensive months of directing the war rationing in Connecticut. Chester Bowles, his wife, whose nickname is Steb, and their daughter, Cynthia, left for a two-week sail on Buzzards Bay. They were out of touch with his Hartford office, and one noon when they had gone ashore for a swim and picnic on the lovely beach in Quick’s Hole, they were joined by the skipper and some of the crew of a Coast Guard cutter which had anchored nearby. Several days later when they put in at Woods Hole for supplies, a headline in the morning paper informed them that “Search for Bowles Continues.” Washington had been searching for him, and Steb confessed she had persuaded the Coast Guard skipper that whatever Washington wanted, it could wait until Chet had his rest.
What Washington wanted was to have Bowles as manager, and then director, of the Office of Price Administration, characterized by FDR as “the most unpopular job in the country.” In the Depression, Bowles and William Benton had formed their advertising firm in New York; it was a time when many businesses were dissatisfied with their agencies, and in twelve years this fresh team became very successful. With money behind him, Bowles was ready to enter public service at the time of Pearl Harbor; the trail led him from Hartford to the national capital and on into twentynine years of public life. His experiences as administrator, governor, congressman, Undersecretary of State, and ambassador he has told energetically, in great detail, and with a liberal philosophy that never falters.
The parts of his book which I think most valuable are those describing “the work I enjoyed most— the day-to-day business of involving more people in the development of policy, of building a smooth-running organization and of mustering public support,”In the OPA he held the line against inflation despite the pressure he was under from Senators Taft and Wherry. Mayor LaGuardia, and See rctary lekes. His testimony before Congress, which he frequently quotes, has the ring of reason, and in the foreseeable future, if there is famine in other parts of the world and a need for rationing here Bowles’s record will serve as an example of what to do.
His campaign for the governorship of Connecticut, which he won by a narrow margin, and his confrontation with the Republican majority in the legislature have the fervor of the times; so, too, his first impressions as a congressman. He had had friendly access to President and Mrs. Roosevelt; he admired them both; and the memoranda which he submitted to FDR about the “economic bill of rights” at the war’s end might have led to his appointment as the first Secretary of the Department of Public Welfare.
When Kennedy ran for the presidency, Bowles had to choose between taking the stump for him and seeking his own re-election to Congress. He chose the former, and the post of Undersecretary to Dean Rusk which came to him as his reward was not to his liking. He should have realized their incompatibility long before he did. He had the chance to make good appointments; Edward R. Murrow in the USIA was one of them, and with Murrow he was staunchly opposed to our action at the Bay of Pigs. But generally, his advice was not sought or followed. His record as our Ambassador to India is a happier phase, but here too, and for the same reason, some of his more pertinent advice fell on deaf ears.
As a record of a man’s dedication, there is much to admire in Promises to Keep; as a book to read for pleasure as well as edification, the text is too unselective, too long, too overcrowded with itineraries and with appointments (wanting to give credit to loyal aides, he credits too many). One can find the essentials, but one must dig, wishing frequently that there might have been more picnics and more of Steb.