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the coast of Pakistan and then all the way back to the mouth of the Red Sea. Reed construction actually proved to be superior in several respects to a comparable wooden boat: strong, buoyant, eminently seaworthy, and more impervious to collision damage. Altogether, what Heyerdahl's experiment chiefly demonstrated was that reed hull construction in and of itself need not have precluded long ocean voyages. He is certainly right, too, in reminding us that sailing in the open sea is in many ways less hazardous than clinging to the coast. Yet cabotage, with very frequent stops, seems to have been favored by most early merchant-sailors. The trading patterns he suggests, involving long, unbroken and specialized voyages, seem too modem. One can believe in sea-trade which extended in some fashion all the way from Sumer to the Indus Valley, for example, without necessarily accepting his entire hypothesis. The traffic between regions was perhaps more incremental, and less efficient and swift, than he assumes. Moreover, surely the entire scene was not as idyllic as Heyerdahl would have us believe. He sentimentalizes, and exaggerates, the "freedom to go anywhere" of the past. Quite possibly, the Tigris came closest to the real conditions ¡of the Sumerian maritime world when it was threatened by pirates at the very start of the voyage and later found it unsafe to land at Socotra. And if Heyerdahl's "golden age" was spared our modem sorts of pollution, it unquestionably suffered from its own examples of man's greed and heedlessness. ' In other words, Thor Heyerdahl is an incurable romantic. Not content with making a solid contribution to our effort to piece together the puzzle of the past, as he has certainly done with this voyage, he cannot resist going on to postulate linkages with Atlantis and the western hemisphere. He remains a diffusionist at a time when scholarly opinion is increasingly leaning toward theories of simultaneous development. Yet if Heyerdahl were not a romantic he would never have built and sailed the Tigris, and maritime history would be the poorer for that, The Tigris Expedition is marvelous reading, and both sailors and scholars can learn a great deal from it. BARBARA M . KREUTZ
Dr. Kreutz is the Dean of the Graduate School ofArts and Sciences and a member of the History Department at Bryn Mawr College. She has published widely and given numerous scholarly papers on medieval Mediterranean shipping and maritime technology. SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982
Pacific Destiny: the Story of America in the Western Sea from the Early 1800s to the 1980s, by Edwin P. Hoyt (W.W. Norton&Co., New York, 1981, xii +323 pp., maps, $16.95). From the title, one would expect this book to be a comprehensive account of American activity in the Pacific in the 19th and 20th centuries; it is actually almost wholly devoted to a narrative of American naval operations. There is virtually nothing on the American merchant ships which first penetrated the Pacific in the late 18th century, and which continued to ply its waters under both sail and steam from that day to this. As a history of naval operations, the book opens with the cruise of the frigate Essex in the War of 1812, and proceeds with brief chapters on naval support for various mercantile enterprises, the expeditions of Wilkes, Perry, and others, the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrections, the Boxer Uprising, and the voyage of the "Great White Fleet" around the world. Over half of the text is devoted to a narrative of the background of World War II and American naval operations in the Pacific during that war . The book concludes with brief accounts of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. Edwin P . Hoyt saw service in the Army Air Corps and the United States Office of War Information during World War II, and this was followed by a career as a foreign correspondent, editor, and freelance writer. He is the author of a dozen books on naval aspects of World War II as well as of others on episodes in the earlier naval history of the Pacific. He writes in a lively style, and his book makes absorbing and entertaining reading. Its coverage prior to 1941 is rather episodic, and slights the gradual development of policy between periods of action. And entertaining as it is, the book contains some careless errors-the Great White Fleet is described as passing through the Panama Canal in 1908 although that waterway was not completed until 1914 and was first used by a United States warship in 1915; the date of the establishment of the International Settlement in Shanghai is given as 1924 whereas 1863 is correct; San Diego is given as the Pacific Coast base for the American battle fleet after World War I although the ships actually anchored in the roadstead off San Pedro and Long Beach. The four-and-ahalf page bibliography is interesting but not comprehensive. Robert Johnson's important studies of the Pacific Squadron and the Asiatic Squadron, for instance, are omitted.
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