And what a life that was! Members of the clan sailed with Mark Twain to Italy and the Holy Land and with Robert Louis Stevenson aboard the schooner Casco to Honolulu and Samoa, and sided with the Rev . Henry Ward Beecher in his famous adultery trial in Brooklyn-all the while raising children, comparing notes, and moving cargo around the oceans of the world in tall Yankee ships. John Duncan, author of this invaluable doorway into a richly various household-as it were--0f many mansions, came from a less venturous branch of the family. His grandfather Charles , brother of the captain of the Florence, had migrated to England with his parents when the family left Brooklyn to open a branch of their New York-based ship agency in Liverpool. After schooling in England and France and some seafaring as mate , he was captured by the Confederates during an action on a South Carolina River. Efforts after the Civil War to re-open the Liverpool agency, and then to drill for oil in Pennsylvania did not pan out, and he took up orangegrowing in rural Florida. Hi s grandson John has ventured greatly in imagination to restore the seafaring world he fell out of, with its family ways, its busi ness cus-
toms in the seaport cities of the day and the tall ships that bound that world together. In the early 1980s, fragments of the wreck of his great-uncle's ship the Florence were found on Vancouver Island and members of the family flew in to inspect them-last relics from a business in great waters that lives again, memorably, in the pages of John Duncan ' s book. PS The Grain Races: The Baltic Background, Basil Greenhill and John Hackman (Conway Maritime Press, London, 190pp , illus, £15.95hb) . The title of this book has very little to do with the basic thrust of the text. The book is concerned with ship-owning in the Aland Islands over the last century or so and, as such, is a good basic outline of that history . The "grain races" relates, however, to a brief, ten-year period within that history and describes a phenomenon which Mr. Greenhill almost seems to disparage as a gimmick dreamed up by Alan Villiers and the media . If that is so, they seem to have done a good job; and Mr. Greenhill has been quick to capitalize on it. For it would seem that the only reason for the use of the ''grain race'' buzzword here
BRING THE HERITAGE HOME
is to sell a not-very-impressive book .. Every so often there is a nod in the direction of the grain races as such , an attempt to marry up subject and title , but it seems rather a duty dance , a politeness to be observed. Mr. Greenhill's heart does not seem to be in it, and anyone who buys thi s book on the strength of the title will be disappointed. Oddly enough, the chapters which are the most interesting , the ship histories of the steel barks Ponape, Parma and Killoran and the wooden Ingrid and Southern Belle while under Aland ownership, only serve to underline the structural defect of this book: the almost complete lack of cohesion or direction . These chapters stand very much alone and, indeed , might have made excellent National Maritime Museum monographs . But Mr. Greenhill, formerly Director of that museum, should not have been content to simply butt together timbers which should have been scarfed. Of course, what Mr. Greenhill sorely needs is an editor or even a good copy editor. It would have spared him not only the above-mentioned problems, but also the avoidable sort of embarrassments that punctuate this book . They range from simple typos , to wrongly-captioned
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