tales of diving and modern adventure beJAMES A. FORSYTHE neath the sea. Mr. Forsythe is Hon. Secretary of the World Ship Trust . Long Live the Queen! Adventure, Queen of the Windjammers, by Joseph E. Garland with Capt. Jim Sharp (Down East Books, Camden, ME 1985, 178pp, illus, $24.95). The 121 ft Gloucester fishing schooner Adventure, built by John F. James & Son of Essex, Mass. , in 1926 and based on the lines of the McManus schooner Oretha F. Spinney, was one of the alltime highliners out of Gloucester. Nesting 14 dories on deck, she fished the Banks under two captains, Jeff Thomas and then Leo Hynes, for 27 years, earning some $4,000,000 at "the dealers' always rock-bottom prices." By 1953, however, dory fishing was pretty much a thing of the past. Young men weren't interested in the long hours of hard work of handlining from dories winter and summer, not when safer and easier berths could be had in the modern beam trawlers. Capt. Hynes complained that the young fishermen didn't know how to work the dories anyway, and by the early '50s most members of his crew were over fifty years old. Compounding the problem, a schooner needed twice the crew of a beam trawler-twentyseven men in Adventure's case, to fish twelve dories. The old schooner was still able, but she had been rendered technologically obsolete. In 1952, Capt. Hynes laid plans to build a modern 65ft steel longliner. He and his partner, Phil Manta, put Adventure up for sale. There were no takers, and Hynes was finding it ever more difficult to get a crew, so Adventure was decommissioned at a pier in Boston's Chelsea Creek. Don Hurd and Newt Newton, who had been operating the eight-three-year old Chesapeake schooner Maggie as a head boat in Maine waters , found her there and bought her to replace their tired old vessel. By 1954, Adventure's second career, as a Maine coast windjammer, had begun. Some eleven years later, Capt. Jim Sharp, who had been sailing John Alden's Malabar XI in the Bahamas charter trade, bought the schooner and set about restoring her to her original rig and glory. He succeeded brilliantly, as anyone who has sailed aboard, or even seen , her will attest. Adventure is today a living, sailing monument to the genius of the men who developed that most perfect of man's machines, the American schooner. Garland's book, by making the ship herSEA HISTORY, SPRING 1986
self the protagonist, captures the reader's imagination in an almost novelistic way, and at the same time conveys the very essence of schooner sailing in the New England fishery. The book includes twenty-two color photographs by John M. Clayton, made during her later years as a sailing dory trawler: these are the only known photographic record in color of this fishery . There are also a great many fine black-and-white photographs by Mr. Clayton. Joseph Garland's collaboration with Captain Jim Sharp proves a happy one. Sharp's love for his schooner has led him along several avenues of research, one of which uncovered John Clayton's remarkable collection of photographs. Garland, a former newspaper reporter and editor, lives on Gloucester Harbor and has long nurtured an interest in the Gloucester fishing schooners-believing, along with many historians of sail, that they represented man's greatest achievement in working sailing vessels. DICK RATH Mr. Rath, senior editor at Yachting magazine and honorary trustee of the NMHS, has sailed the schooner Pioneer out of South Street in New York with young people in crew. Seamarks: Their History and Development, by John Naish (Sheridan House, Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1985, 192pp, illus, $29 .50hb). Seamarks charts the development of fixed navigational aids from their first use by the Phoenicians to the present. Naish draws on primary sources in many languages to illuminate the many commercial, political and technological developments that have affected-for good or ill-the development of navigational aids. Of special interest are his descriptions of such alliances and organizations as the Hanseatic League and the more altruistically motivated Trinity House. Endowed with generous plans, charts and photographs, the presentation is a PAMELA VOSBURGH visual delight. The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, by N. K. Sandars (Thames and Hudson, NYC, 1985, 2nd ed., 224pp, illus, $10.95pb). The demise of the empires of the Eastern Mediterranean and the coming of what Sandars summarizes as "contracted horizons" has long puzzled historians . There is a fair amount of evidence for what happened , to be sure, but it ranges from the less than impartial pictorial and literary descriptions found in Egypt and the Levant to the archaeological finds of
preliterate tribes in the Danubian basin. It is clear that these were times of significant shifts in populations, and the lack of more declarative evidence would indicate this: People on the march are bad record keepers. Sandars has attempted to present and explain much of the available data from Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Aegean islands and the Balkans, and she is well qualified to do so. Synthesis is not her forte, though, and one closes The Sea Peoples richer in facts, but not in meaning . LINCOLN P. PAINE
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