REVIEWS and who are all but missing from hi s narrative, nor, by his own admission , in the opinion of Scandinavian and Baltic seamen aboard. Whatever the opinion of the those who sai led in 1938 with the nineteen-year-old Newby, I doubt anyone can read this book (written twenty years later) without liking the author heartily. One finds oneself seeing things his way even when he breaks cardinal rules of seamanship. You see the muddled sense when he asks the mate if he can change his shoes before going aloft, and share his outrage when he is charged the price of a hammer he loses over the side. Eric Newby, you feel , is an island of sanity in a world of Vikings run amok . He writes with the humor that truly awful experiences often take on after the years have past . Fights , bad weather, infestations of bugs and generally loathesome conditions are all described with good natured wit. He describes the condition of things below the focsle head deck in terms of his subsequent experience as a pri soner of war: Not even the pits beside the railway tracks so thoughtfully provided by the Germans for our convenience when we were being moved westwards in chains from Czechoslovakia equaled the lavatories in the Moshulu. The ship is a study in anachronisms. Well kept and seaworthy, and yet with hellish living quarters and bad food-she is beautiful and gruesome at the same time . We see a collection of men from countries soon to be facing each other across the battlefield , sailing around the world in the last year of peace. The reader knows that with the end of this voyage , the coming of World War II will bring an end to the world of great sailing LARRY OTWAY cargo ships. Mr. Otway, Director of the St . Brendan Project in New York, spent many happy hours aboard the Moshulu when she was at the South Street Seaport in the early 1970s.
Masters of the Sea: British Marine Watercolours , Roger Quarm and Scott Wilcox (Phaidon Press w/ National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1987, 96pp, illus, $17.95/ÂŁ1 I .50pb) The tradition of British marine watercolors began as a practical undertaking by British seamen to illustrate the topography of ports and coasts they visited. Its development was profoundly influenced by the Dutch marine artists William Van de Velde the Elder and the Younger, who moved to England in the late seventeenth century. Their greatest 50
contribution to the genre was their objectivity in rendering the appearance of ships and shipping. The conventions of this tradition were carried on by a number of sai lor/artists whose apprenticeship was served not in the studio but at sea. In the nineteenth century , marine watercolors began to shed this conventional style in pursuit of a more purely aesthetic and painterly interpretation of seascapes until , ultimately , ship portraiture and seascapes became almost two distinct genres . Published as an exhibition catalogue for the National Maritime Museum and the Yale Center for Marine Art, Masters of the Sea illuminates the technical and aesthetic issues involved in the development of British marine watercolor paintings over the last four centuries. The essays by Roger Quarm, of the museum , and Scott Wilcox , of the center, together with the beautifully reproduced illustrations in color and black and white , make this an exceptional guide to the subject. PAMELA VOSBURGH Ms . Vosburgh has worked as an archivist at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, as well as for a variety of fine arts publications.
The Down Easters: American Deepwater Sailing Ships, 1869-1929, Basil Lubbock (Dover Publications, Mineola , NY , 1987 (repr. 1930 ed.), 284pp, illus , $7.95pb)
American Clipper Ships 1833-1858 (2 vols) , Octavius T. Howe and Frederick G. Matthews (Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1986 (repr. 1926 ed.), 780pp, illus, $8.95pb each) When the young Basil Lubbock came home from the Klondyke in 1899 , he came by way of Cape Hom , before the mast in a square-rigger. He chose a British vessel , preferring the poor grub and relatively easy ways of a latter-day limejuicer to the belaying pin soup served up aboard the crack American Down Easters in the Cape Horn trade . But he felt then , as he did to the end of his days , that these hard-driven , flawlessly maintained Yankee ships made up an admirable chapter in the story of deepwater sail. And in years to come , as he wrote of the vanishing world of the sailing ship, he collected stories, photographs, letters , clippings-anything and everything he could to preserve the heritage of these handsome, more burdensome successors to the clippers which flouri shed from the mid- l 840s to the mid-50s. Lubbock ' s appreciation of the Down Easter which finally appeared in 1929 , is largely anecdotal , but includes valu-
able statistical material and rings with the authori ty of a true seafaring man. Some cognoscenti have carped at minor errors picked up in the act of retrieving sailors ' memories of vanished ships and crews-but Lubbock cannot be faulted , indeed cannot be matched in his feel for the life in these proud Yankee ships, and the wide-horizon perspective he brings to their sai ling. Howe and Matthews set out to catalogue that earlier, more famous breed of ship , the lithe , heavily sparred clippers that broke records in all oceans just before the Civil War. In research dating back to 1877 , they assembled biographies of 352 ships, complete with extensive quotations from contemporary letters, memoirs and newspaper accounts of these ships that for a brief, shining decade showed the world what was possible under sail. Dover is to be congratulated for bringing out these classy reprints of these classics-works not just of their age but for the ages. A new generation is in for a treat when it gets these well produced volumes to study and dream over. PETER STANFORD
Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, 18851985, Stephen Schwartz (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick , NJ , 1986, 156pp, illus , $40.00hb) Born with a "Sailors ' Declaration of Independence'' on 6 March 1885 amid the trul y terrible conditions of labor then prevailing aboard US-flag merchant ships, the Sailors' Union of the Pacific has struggled through a hard-fought, stormy passage to arrive at the quite different scene of today , when conditions of US-flag seafaring are the best of any nation in the world, but when there are hardly any US-flag ships left on the oceans. The scene on which Stephen Schwartz's outstanding history of the union opens is one in which American sailors for two years running refused to participate in the American celebration of the Fourth of July, saying that " the spectacle of a slave worshipping his chains would be less ludicrous than that of the American seaman celebrating Independence Day." If this sounds like left-wing propaganda, try some objective statistics: "The U.S. merchant marine, with less than 10 percent of world commerce , reported over half as many cases of scurvy and beri-beri as the British merchant fleet , with 67 percent of world shipping ."' Scurvy? Beri-beri? If this sounds medieval , well , it was. In the drive to roll back early gains made by the union , SEA HISTORY , AUTUMN 1987