REVIEWS A Portrait of a Ship; the Benj. F. Packard, by Paul C. Morris (Lower Cape Publishing, Orleans MA, 1987, l 88pp, illus, $30.00hb) In 1930, Paul Morris's family moved to Rye, New York where his father had been hired as advertising manager of the new county park, Playland, on Long Island Sound. Earlier that year, the big 2,000-ton down easter Ben). F. Packard had been towed in to become a feature of the park. She became the biggest thing in six-year-old Paul 's life. Then, in the spring of 1939, the sadly deteriorated ship was towed out to be scuttled in the Sound. Paul 's father documented the whole ship in photographs before she left, and went out with her to record her scuttling as well. Those photos, and nearly half a century of searching out information about the ship, make up the basis of this lively and authoritative ship biography. Launched in Bath, Maine, in 1883 from the yard of Goss, Sawyer & Packard, the Packard was built for the trade around Cape Horn to North and South American West Coast ports. She also journeyed on to the Orient on occasion. Under the command of the notorious Zaccheus Allen, she soon gained an unenviable place in the Red Record, a journal of atrocities committed against seamen, and earned the unpleasant sobriquet, "Battleship of the American Merchant Marine." Morris draws on Allen 's correspondence with the Sew al ls, owners of the ship for most of her time in the Cape Horn trade, to establish the actualities of the voyaging, revealing the human side of "Tiger" Allen, and also revealing his callousness toward human suffering. To this reader, Allen emerges as a rather querulous, ill-tempered man who may have been pushed around more than somewhat by his son Joe, who sailed with him as chief mate until "going wrong" (in his father's words), staying ashore in the fleshpots of New York. The Packard was not a fast sailer, compared with her contemporaries. But Allen drove her in a manner fit to carry away canvas and spars and kill seamen. Was he trying to make a carthorse perform as a racehorse, as Morris suggestsor was he an insensitive shipmaster, as unable to get the best out of ships as he was of men? It's difficult to tell, because his successor, Captain St. Claire (who it turns out was the person who shortened the ship's rig, getting rid of the skysails), was no prize either. St. Claire was dismissed on confidential advice from the ship's agents in Montevideo, who reSEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1989
ported the captain continuously inebriated and guilty of a string of not-sominor peculations. Allen's wife, Francescar, a handsome and resolute woman judging by her photo, sailed with him on occasion. In a letter to his mother reporting a heavy sea that flooded the cabin, he reports Ett (as he called his wife) doing "good work" in bailing out the cabin. Not one to resist an opportunity to be snide, he adds: "I suppose Ett thought it better to bail than drown" - a comment that also seems to reveal an unhappy distance between husband and wife. One would like to know more of Francescar (or Fransescar- the name is spelled both ways) who died only in 1929 at age 83, outliving her quarrelsome husband by 14 years. Author of previous works on New England shipping, including an authoritative history of the little-known (or noticed) schooner barges that gradually replaced sailing schooners in coastal traffics in the first part of this century, Paul Morris left the advertising business in New York to take up a career as author, artist, and fisherman in Nantucket 30 years ago. He has amassed an extensive collection of photographs, letters, ledgers and other records in pursuit of these interests, and with this lively and authoritative portrait of an important ship in American shipping history, he makes a unique and valuable contribution. A Portrait of a Ship could have benefitted from more careful indexing and copy-editing, but the matter of the book is simply first-class, shedding clear light on the Packard and on some of the more obscure corners of the experience of the Yankee square-riggers that ended the American story in deepwater sail. PS The First Salute, by Barbara W. Tuchman (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988, 347pp, illus, $22.95hb) The British Navy and the American Revolution, by John A. Tilley (University of South Carolina, Columbia, 1987 , 332pp, illus, $24.95hb) The First Salute, currently a bestseller, is the last published work of the late Barbara Tuchman , a respected and well-known historian with a string of historical works to her credit, extending over fifty years. Students of the American Revolution are accustomed to a point of view, usually land-bound and largely concerned with American philosophy, politics and army maneuvers . The essential contribution of naval warfare and marine trade often appears as a side issue. New books
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