REVIEWS Atlantic Four-Master: The Story of the Schooner Herbert L. Rawding 19191947, Francis E. Bowker (Mystic Seaport Museum , Mystic , CT, 1986, 96pp , illus, plans, $28 .00hb/$18.00pb) Built in the shipping boom that followed immediately after World War I, the 1100-ton four-masted schooner Herbert L. Rawding was picked up and put in service again in the boom times that followed World War II. Shorn of her canvas and reduced to three masts, she was outfitted with two 21-ton diesels which shook her up so badly that she foundered at sea, off Spain, a little short of her thirtieth birthday . Not a bad run for a big schooner, hard used through her whole life except when she was laid up , when she got no care at all . Captain Francis "Biff" Bowker was the Rawding' s bosun in her final run before the United States entered World War II, and in this book he has carefully and with true color and lively detail told the story of his time in her, and of the experience of others . The resulting work glows with life . It is a labor of love . Captain Bowker found photos of the vessel a-building in Stockton Springs , Maine, and ready to launch, her tall masts bedecked with flags, her hefty transom finished bright like a yacht's, in September 1919 . There are photos of her unloading scrap lumber in Miami, and logwood in Baltimore-and waiting at anchor off New London, her after sails keeping her head to wind, while the super J boat Ranger glides by under spinnaker. Talk about contrasts! And there are photos when Bowker was in her, outfitting in Perth Amboy, running in a gale, lying with the last of her kind in Newport News, where in December 1940, three big four-masters lay together at anchor¡ for awhile. Bowker knew them all, and knew their masters ~nd many of their crew by reputation when he did not know them personally . The schooners he sailed in were a way oflife to him , and he strove mightily to be proficient and earn himself a name. One incident of carrying sail a little too Jong in quest of the bubble reputation is poignantly told-his remembered shame for the danger he put the ship in bums through the pages recounting this bit of youthful excess . A literate youngster from inland Vermont, Bowker rose pretty fast in seafaring and reached the rank of mate in the big schooners he sought out to sail in. But he sailed before the mast too, and obviously fitted well in the crews he sailed with. He has a fine ear for their talk and a feel for their gripes, their SEA HISTORY , WINTER 1987-88
friendships and loyalties . To one familiar with the tag-end of sail in New York harbor, it is a distinct thrill to read of " Nigger" Charlie Hoyt sending aboard the crew for Bowker's second voyage in the Rawding-he was the last of the South Street crimps- and to find among the crew Eddie Moran, "a young Irish fellow from Boston." That same fellow , still young at heart twenty and thirty years later, worked to bring the fishing schooner L.A. Dunton into Mystic Seaport and was active in South Street in the 1970s, making rope fenders, typing his memoirs amid muttered imprecations and generally keeping sailorly interests and connections alive. ' 'A fine crew ,'. ' Bowker calls this gang that took the aging Rawding to Newport News for coal, and onward to Martinique in November 1941. Bowker lets his feeling for the old schooner speak for itself. Amid comments on cramped quarters and details of gear and handling arrangements, at the end, when the vessel has lost her lofty topmasts and massive jibboom, one comes on this comment on a picture of her in this shorn condition: "she retains the dignified appearance common to ships of sail." The essential dignity of the schooner and her people shine, indeed, through the pages of Captain Bowker's book. PETER STANFORD The American President Lines and its Forebears 1848-1984, John Niven (University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE, 1987, 327pp, illus, $39.SOhb) No other American ship line can claim the long heritage of American President Lines. Now approaching its 150th anniversary, the company has been equally famous under three different names, Pacific Mail, Dollar and APL. The current work can only begin to tell the story .. . but it is a fine beginning! Taking its tone from the excellent colored book jacket print of the transpacific liner Japan, the work fairly races through huge chunks of tremendously interesting maritime history, including the story of the Panama route, the arrival of the steamship on the West Coast, the Gold Rush, the opening of Japan, the SpanishAmerican and two World Wars-not to mention the frantic post-World War II era. Some of the sagas touched upon are well worth the fuller treatment of a major book-notably the story of the 502s and 535s, built too late to serve as World War I troopships, but which turned out to be the backbone of the inter-war American liner fleet. The somewhat tawdry story of how the second generation
of the Dollar family tarnished the reputation of their most aggressive and able parent-old Captain Robert Dollar-is barely hinted at; there just is not space . The book is fully annotated and future historians will bless John Niven for this extra effort as the notes alone will lead them into many different areas of productive research. The pictures are too few and too far between; the work should stimulate scholars to bigger and better efforts-for this reason it is particularly FRANK 0 . BRAYNARD important . Mr. Braynard, co-chairman of the NMHS Advisors, is curator of the American Merchant Marine Museum in Kings Point, New York . Always Good Ships: Histories of Newport News Ships, William A. Fox (The Donning Company Publishers, Norfolk/ Virginia Beach, VA, 1986, 387pp, illus, $27 .95hb) Since 1886 the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company has produced fleets of superb ships. The modem history of America's place in the world may be traced with the steel hulls that have come down this shipyard's ways, where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. Both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam have been fought with ships that were made here; and in times between these conflicts, when commerce peaceably plied its trade from port to i:lort, the yard Collis Potter Huntington founded 101 years ago produced almost every conceivable type of vessel from steam yachts to ocean liners, cargo ships, dredges and cable layers, tugs, lumber carriers and Bay steamers. William Fox' s book records basic technical facts laced with some narrative history (one wishes for more) . But the whole history of the yard's ship construction is here, from the launching of Hull No. 1, the quadruple-expansion, single-boiler tug Dorothy of 1891 through to the largest shipbuilding contract in history-for the two nuclear-powered carriers Abraham Lincoln and George Washington , due for delivery in 1989 and 1991 respectively. Of course many of these ships made history, though not all of it for the best. The infamous tanker Torrey Canyon hit world headlines in 1967 when she ran aground near Seven Stones Reef off the southwest coast of England, and spilled 118,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude over an area of some 350 square miles . But most of what Newport News launched evokes the best this country has ever built: carriers like Ranger, Yorktown, Essex and Intrepid (now a museum ship in New York City); Great White Fleet battlewagons of the caliber of Kearsarge and Kentucky; and 47