REVIEWS get her into port. Only one man was lost in this trauma, the steward Doig. But as the author notes: "Many years later in the 1930s Capt. David Watson still spoke sadly of the loss of Tom Doig, and it was obvious that a high degree of mutual respect and friendship had developed during their many years together aboard the Indian Empire." Who wouldn't want to be remembered like that? The book is full of such deeply realistic senes which make it rewarding reading for landlubber and old salt alike. PS China Tea Clippers, by George F. Campbell, illus by author (International Marine Publishing, Camden ME, 1990, 156p, illus, $24.95). This classic work, first issued in 1974, features Campbell's stunning scratchboard drawings of the fine-lined, beautiful racehorse ships whose history and construction details he sets forth with authority and verve. PS Caribbean, James A. Michener (Random House, New York, 1989, 667p, $24.95hb) Although Michener didn't begin his writing career until the age of 40, he has enjoyed long success as a best-selling author, beginning with Tales ofthe South Pacific, which won a Pulitzer prize and was the basis for the hugely popular Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. He followed that, over the next 40 years, with 28 additional novels, including Hawai , Iberia , Chesapeake , Texas , and Space. Surely, few authors have mixed so successfully history and fiction. Michener's approach is to select an area, assemble all available facts and history of that area for the chosen time period (in the instance at hand , over 500 years of recorded history and about 200 pre-Columbian years), then invent plausible fictional characters to fit the historical framework. He provides a chapter-by-chapter guide to which places, events, and people are historic and which are fictional. In the earlier chapters all of the characters are fictional, but the general progression of events is historically correct. The peaceful Arawak islanders were indeed overrun by the cannibalistic Caribs, and the decline and fall of the great Mayan empire is historically accurate, though the characters are fictional. Curiously, this book includes but little of Christopher Columbus 's efforts to persuade King Ferdinand and Queen Isa40
bellaofSpain to sponsor a voyage to fi nd China and Japan by sai ling west. By the device of a series of dialogues between a fictional representative ofKing Ferdinand and vario us res idents of Hispaniola two years after Columbus's death, the author covers the Admiral's subsequent voyages. After the triumphal first voyage, the Sovereign gave-him a fleet of 17 ships to transport 1500 colonists to the New World, most of whom were sons of wealthy Spanish families, and most of these proved to be rather arrogant and lazy. For his third voyage the monarchs assigned a large contingent of convicts as colonists. Columbus took up his duties as govemorof Hispaniola, but apparently made many enemies, and was not conspicuously successful. Within two years, Francisco de Bobadilla arrived, armed with letters from the king giv ing him absolute governing power over the colony, and he sent Columbus and his two brothers back to Spain in chai ns. T he three were immediately released, but it was 1502 before Columbus was able to put together another expedition, this time with four ships. Still hoping to fi nd Asia (and resurrect his reputation), he sailed past the islands to what is now known as Honduras and then, in heavy weather, followed the coastline south as far as the Gulf of Darien, between the modem nations of Colombia and Panama. Attempting to sail back to Hispaniola, he was stranded on the island of Jamaica. There was little hope of rescue because no ships called at Jamaica, so Diego Mendez, one of the ship 's company and a member of Spanish nobility, built a small canoe and paddled some 200 mi les to Hispaniola, where he got a ship to rescue his shipmates. Columbus returned to Spain , where he died, in nearpoverty and neglect, in 1506. As the story moves on into the latter part of the 16th century, Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins pl ay their historic roles as slave traders (with the financial backing of Queen Elizabeth I) and staunch, if somewhat piratical, defenders of the English crown. Because the English were disrupting Spanish colonial power as well as endangering the fleets carrying si lver from Peru to Spain, King Philip ordered a massive armada, comprising some 130 ships, including transports and merchantmen, and 30,000 men, to sail to Flanders, pick up the army of the Duke of Parma,
and invade England. After some delays the Armada anchored off Calais in August, 1588, having suffered some long-range attacks by Eng li sh ships. With Drake as Vi ce Admiral , the Engli sh fl eet caught them there, sent fire ships into the anchorage and then attacked at close range as the huge fleet sailed. The Armada was badly damaged, but a change of wind enabled most of the ships to escape to the north, hoping to return to Spain by sailing west around Ireland and Scotland. Short of prov isions and battered by heavy weather, only about half the fleet made it. Thus ended the Armada. The book moves on to cover the slave/ sugar development of Barbados, the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell in England, piracy, the manipulation of the English market by a sugar cartel in Jamaica, the rise of Horatio Nelson, Victor Hugues and his traveling guillotine on Guadeloupe during and after the French Revolution , the domination of the French in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and subsequent revolt by its Afri can slaves, the Briti sh domination of the slave- based economy on Jamaica and , into modem times, Cuba and Fidel Castro, Rastafari ans, and the flow of refugees to the US . Throughout thi s panoramic novel, much attention is paid to sex and violence, especially the latter. People are burned at the stake, broken on the rack, hacked to death , hung, strangled, run through, shot, blown up, beaten to death, or have boi ling water poured down their throats. In the second chapter the reader is even treated to a detailed account of the ritual cutting out of a still-beating human heart as a sacrificial offering to the rain god: "Bolon remained alive just long enough to see his own heart placed reverently in the waiting saucer of Chae Mool. " The history of the Caribbean, like the hi story of the world, is undoubtedl y a brutal story. The history of human ideas, however, is the more important story. Caribbean, by its sweeping scope, does a creditable job of interweaving the two, and makes a good yam of it all. D ICK R ATH
Mr. Rath is a former editor-in-chief of Yachting magazine -and an Advisor to NMHS.
SEA HISTORY 56, WINTER 1990