REVIEWS 1--THE _ __. CLASSICS
OF NAVAL
LITERATURE
Asuperbly crafted collection of classic literature preserves the celebrated works of America's foremost writers of naval history, biography, and fiction. The fine titles currently available:
The Sand Pebbles My Fifty Years in the Navy The Victory at Sea The Commodores Recollections of a Naval Officer, 1841-1865 Man-of-War Life Sailing Alone Around the World Delilah Run Silent, Run Deep Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean Bluejacket: An Autobiography With the Battlecruisers Autobiography of George Dewey The Naval War of 1812 The Quiet Warrior The Sinking of the Merrimac White-Jacket The Big E The Cruel Sea Two Years on the Alabama
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Sailing Craft of East Anglia, Roger Finch & Hervey Benham (Terence Dalton, Lavenham, Suffolk UK, 1987, 144pp, illus., ÂŁ11.95hb or $23.50 postpaid from NMHS) Two of the best-known authorities on small craft on the coasts of Britain (particularly the East Coast, their great interest) combined the their unique talents and resources to produce this engaging and authoritative work. Roger Finch, a talented illustrator, and ship historian Hervey Benham, the great authority on the sailing craft of East Anglia, have both passed on since the book was published. In many ways it stands as a unique contribution to the records of sail on the East Coast, until its demise early in the 20th century. After a general introduction, the authors narrate in some detail the story of trade on the East Coast, where sail lasted longer than anywhere else in northwestern Europeindeed until the last Thames sailing barge ceased trading under sail in 1970. Upwards of50 of these renowned workhorses of the Thames Estuary survive as barge yachts and preserved by enthusiasts for pleasure parties. The narrative takes up the tale of fishermen and the ways of the East Coast fisheries, which produced different types and methods from estuary to estuary, from the Thames to the Wash. They sum up with a chapter on the Indian Summer of the workboats, a good few of which have now been restored. Modem replicas are also being built, so that several historic types, once thought to be gone forever, can again be seen sailing on their home waters. To complete this compendium, the authors then describe each type of watercraft individually, well illustrated with a few pages devoted to each. JAMES FORSYTHE
Mr.Forsythe is the vice Chairman ofthe World Ship Trust, and President of the Norfolk Wherry Trust.He was a founder of both organizations. Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, Williafu Doerflinger (Meyer Books, Glenwood IL, 1951, repr. 1989, illus., 362pp, $19.95pb) The old foc ' sle crowd has passed on but... what music they left ringing in our ears! Basil Lubbock, who shipped out in the Royalshire on her passage home from San Francisco to England's Liverpool in 1899, was impressed by the singing of her men in the hard conditions
of the big bark's stormy passage home by way of Cape Hom. And with his interest awakened in sailormen and their ways, he began haunting the docklands. He tells how one quiet Sunday morning three ships' crews got together, two British and one American-from the famous Down Easter Henry B. Hydeto warp the British Dawpool into the Liverpool docks after a rough Cape Hom passage home. The crews hauled and sang together until the heavens rang, attracting a crowd down to the waterfront, and reaching out to make honest burghers pause in quiet streets and squares far inland, entranced perhaps by the wild music breaking in on the Sabbath quiet. But the music is not only wild, it is as Lubbock says, "impressive," and it is beautiful. The late Captain A.G . Spiers tells how the crew of his British fullrigged ship Wavertree stopped the traffic on the bridge at Portland, Oregon, when they chantied up the anchor. Tramping round the captsain on the foc ' sle head to set sail for Old England, they sang "Hurrah my boys, we' re homeward bound." You can find that fine, stirring song in Mr. Doerflinger's bookand be assured, his three versions are each as different sailors sang it. Stan Hugill of Outward Bound School at Aberdovey, Wales, and before that the big four-masted Garthpool, whom Alan Villiers called "the last chantyman anywhere, I'd think," sang chanties with Villier's brother in a German prison camp in World War II. In fact I find a powerful image of the sense of freedom in these songs-echoing with the crash of salt water and the carolling ofuntrammelled winds. Hugill, who sang on the face of wide oceans as well as behind German barbed wire, regularly refers to Doerflinger' s work as the real thing, "taken down from sailor songs by tape recorder." Well, actually , Doerflinger used acetate discs and wax records at first, with the clumsy recording equipment available half a century and more ago, when he set out to capture the wild, fugitive testimony of the sailors and lumbermen of North America singing their own songs in their own ways. This was early enough to catch men still part of the living tradition of the old sailing packets and clippers. The old salts in their seventies and eighties who sang their songs to him were kids who learned them from men who'd sailed in ships SEA HISTORY 52, WINTER 1989-90