Studies in Global and American Maritime History
Lincoln Paine
THE SEA & CIVILIZATION
New York, Knopf, 2013
In this ambitious work Lincoln Paine has written a maritime history of nothing less than the entire world. Even within its vast scope, however, three references to our small part of the world appear: Theodore Roosevelt’s risky 1905 dive in a submarine in Long Island Sound, the growing popularity of steamboat excursions from New York into Long Island Sound in the late 1800s, and southern New England’s 19th century whaling ports.
Selected chapter titles illustrate the author’s broad range: Bronze Age Seafaring, The Christian and Muslim Mediterranean, China Looks Seaward, Naval Power in Steam and Steel, The Maritime World Since the 1950s. This hefty tome represents a distillation of global maritime history, the subjects of its enormous appended bibliography filtered through the author’s intelligence and sensibility. Our copy is a gift from Capt. Joe Maco.
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Eloise Engle and Arnold S. Lott
AMERICA’S MARITIME HERITAGE
Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1972
As our national bicentennial was approaching, these authors intended to augment standard history textbooks with a narrative threading all things maritime through the story of America. This encyclopedic introduction to a sprawling subject has topics ranging from colonial seaports to piracy and slavery, from the art of navigation to inland waterways, to cultural and technical subjects such as literature, band music, ship models, naval combat art, radar, and even a Connecticut specialty: naval underwater sound research.
Among the links to New London and Groton is a reference to the 1834 rebuild of "Old Ironsides" (U.S.S. Constitution), when some of her salvaged timbers were fashioned into the sturdy doors of our Custom House then under construction; an illustrated account of the S.S. Savannah under Capt. Moses Rogers of New London, the first ship to cross the Atlantic using steam power; an account of Groton native John Ledyard’s efforts to promote the fur trade with China; the rise and decline of New London's whaling industry; the influence of the sea on playwright Eugene O’Neill; and finally, the birth of the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet with USS Nautilus, launched in Groton in 1954 after being christened by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.
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W. Jeffrey Bolster
BLACK JACKS: AFRICAN-AMERICAN SEAMEN IN THE AGE OF SAIL
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997
For Black History Month we presented a book dealing with the part played by Black Americans, both slave and free, in the maritime life of the colonies and the nation that emerged after the Revolution and War of 1812. The author opens with a moving quotation from Frederick Douglass, a skilled ship caulker in Baltimore who knew a great deal about ships and sailing: "Those beautiful vessels, robed in white, and so delightful to the eyes of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts." Calling them "freedom's swift-winged angels," he swore that one of them would someday bear him to freedom.
A sailor's life at sea in the Age of Sail was harsh, marked by low wages, hard work and extreme discomfort, but for slaves and freedmen of a certain bent it represented opportunity. Even with its privations a sailor's life was preferable to the punishing toil and other horrors of Southern plantation life. The author examines all aspects of this history, noting that 18,000 free Blacks saw service in the War of 1812, that several generations of Blacks "circumvented the racist norms of American society" in becoming part of international maritime culture, and that as a result of their travels Black mariners were "central to the process through which early Black society constructed and defined itself."
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Eric Jay Dolin
WHEN AMERICA FIRST MET CHINA
New York, Liveright, 2012
Eric Dolin's Brilliant Beacons - A History of the American Lighthouse, also on our shelves, is only the latest of his maritime-themed studies. This earlier book discusses the origin of America's trade with China after the Revolutionary War. As one of the great sagas of the Age of Sail, an understanding of the early China trade is essential, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "to understanding today's China as it resumes its place among the foremost nations of the world." Western hunger for porcelain, silk and tea led to the building of factories to meet the burgeoning need, while Chinese demand for luxury items such as the fur of seals and sea otters, of sandalwood and silver, filled the holds of ships bound for China. The comparisons one may draw between then and now, when trade with China is so much in the news, gives special resonance to this well written account.
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Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster and Alexander Keyssar
THE WAY OF THE SHIP
America's Maritime History Reenvisioned 1600 - 2000
Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, 2008
Public awareness and understanding of maritime history resides primarily along our coastlines, but since the millenium it has loomed ever wider in national consciousness as we navigate the unsettled waters of globalized economics and consumerism. From the containership revolution to trade imbalances, from the arrival of the megaships to the expansion of ports in response to the new Panama Canal, public awareness of the importance of merchant shipping is likely greater than at any time since World War II. On top of this we are witnessing the exponential growth of the cruise industry, with ever larger ships and passenger capacity. This book runs a four-hundred year gamut, from the dugout canoes of Native Americans through our highly checkered maritime history to the state of things as of 2000.
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Kenneth J. Blume
Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Maritime Industry
Scarecrow Press, 2012
The cover depicts the famous Hudson River steamboat Mary Powell, but we could wish the author had chosen one of the equally famous vessels that operated in Long Island Sound in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as those of the Norwich & New York Line, or the Fall River Line. Both companies have entries in this encyclopedic volume, along with every other shipping company and shipyard known to the author, a maritime historian. Individuals who played major roles are here, such as New London's Captain Moses Rogers who in 1819 achieved the first transatlantic crossing with the S.S. Savannah using steam power, other famous ships, enterprises such as Merritt-Chapman & Scott, the maritime salvage and construction firm that absorbed Capt.T. A. Scott's historic New London operation, and major pieces of maritime legislation. Groton submarine builder Electric Boat Co. is here, as is Interstate Navigation's Point Judith-Block Island ferry.
Local readers will ask why there is no mention of the multiple daily round-trips of Cross Sound Ferry's New London-Long Island service, or why Groton's Eastern Shipbuilding Co. is not named in the entry for S.S. Minnesota, which when launched in 1905 was the largest cargo liner in the world. Caveats aside, the wealth of information packed into these 581 pages is a valuable addition to any maritime history library.
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Marc Songini
THE LOST FLEET
A Yankee Whaler's Struggle against the Confederate Navy and Arctic Disaster
New York, St. Martin's Press, 2007
There are travails aplenty in this account of whalers struggling to prosper in a dying industry. The Yankee whaler of the title is Thomas W. Williams of Wethersfield, Connecticut, whose long career is one of the threads of Songini's narrative. Even in the best of times whaling was arduous, crews enduring storms in temperate waters or ice in the frigid north.
Then came the Civil War with Confederate raiders causing havoc with the whalers and countering the Union effort to hinder shipping by blocking Confederate harbors with scuttled, stone-laden ships. Part of the so-called "Stone Fleet" comprised six idled whalers from New London which sailed southward in 1861, barely seaworthy, and to no avail in the end because the bold idea was inherently flawed, as readers will find in this intriguing story.