s.~n.bl~tory AND HISTORIC PROGRAMS ACROSS AMERICA
NMHS Mission: Art, Literature, Adventure, Lore & Leaming by Peter Stanford
When we started out with the magazine Sea History in 1972 friendly advisors said: "Stay away from the word ' history! ' Call the thing 'heritage,' or 'patrimony' or some fat-sounding word like that. The word ' history ' does not appeal to people." This did not sit well with Editor Frank Braynard, or with the late Leonard Rennie or Norman Brouwer or myself, who sat in on this first issue. No, we did not like thi s well meant advice one bit-and the more we thought about it, the less we liked it. We arrived at the simple, and to us more pleasing formula: "We don ' t ask whether you are interested in history; we ask whether you are interesting to history." By this we meant, I guess, people who get out and contribute something to life don ' t need to be " interested" in history , they have enlarged their lives to become part of the human story (which is history), and so the interest is there.
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Thi s past October, after 18 1/2 years of the Sea History experiment (the terms of which we 've never altered), I found myself by happy chance in a scholarly colloquy of the University of Exeter in England. The gang met in a storybook setting of Dartington Hall (I mean real storybook: a foundation set up to restore the native ways of Devon, by a cultivated Engli shman married to an American heiress, bless 'em both!). There was Nicholas Rodger, author of that wonderful book The Wooden World (see SH 44, p. 44), which violates Gresham 's law through its sterling research and lively insights driving out the debased currency of revi sioni st hi storians who miss the animating principles and therefore the meaning of what those British tars achieved at sea in their wooden walls. And also present was Andrew Lambert, author of Battleships in Tran sition, a splendid account of the Victorian navy 's transition from sail to steam-a navy that did not steam so badly after all! And let me content myself by saying it was a stellar group of scholars young and old, with a salting of grizzled veterans like Alec Hurst (see "Marine Art," thi s issue) who brought me there. When it came my tum to say why I was there I said ouroutfit published Sea History, which some of them knew , of course. I said the briefest way to describe our mission was to say what we did not do: "We do not popularize history!" These words seem to be well received, and in subsequent discussions I was glad to find unanimous interest in the function of a magazine that draws the concerns of sea literature and sail training and marine art and scholarly research together, and lays these bundled interests before the people. People, mark you-not "a mass audience," or "a discriminating few" either, or people sorted out in any other condescending, manipulative terms-just people, in their essential quality as human beings. We are all alive and if we are SEA HISTORY 56, WINTER 1990
involved in the wider world around us we are involved in history-which is the story of that world, past, present and future. (The briefest reflection on the nature of time in its passage will show that none of its compartments-past, present, future-has any real meaning or actually any real existence without the others, an elephant of a fact of life that walks invi sibly by historians who are mere antiquarians and futuri sts who are-well, futuri sts). Alec practically tore hi s remaining hair out listening to discuzioneon these topics with all and sundry, but he patiently took me to a gaggle of marine art shows, ranging from the American expatriate Mark Myers' superb one-man show in his now-native Devon, to the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Marine Artists in London-and of course, marine artists being what they are, the conversations here ranged from shiphandling in the late 1700s (when you had to come upon the wind fast you let all sheets fly forward-all at once!) to the glamor that for some of us (I do not say all!) clings to small craft working amid estuarine mudflats, a glamor that can be caught and transmitted in a gleam of oil paint. Other meetings I sat in on in this late-October visit were directors ' meetings of our affiliated World Ship Trust, and the Sail Training Association which serves in loco parentis to the American Sail Training Association and likeminded bodies around the world. Great things are afoot with both organizations, things which, in reporting, your Society will have some role in shaping-as will be clear in coming issues of Sea History next year. NOTE: There will be more if) future Sea Historys on every item above, which I could only mention here. I've tried to cover a tremendous sweep of ground here seeking to explain how the words in the subtitle on our cover got there. 7