REVIEWS believed it unreasonable for the federal government to regulate industry. In the era of States Rights, slavery debates, and a host of other national and sectional difficul ties, the federal gove rnment rarely even considered this type of legislation. Yet, Congress could no longer ignore the growing problem of steamboat explosions, which caused the deaths of over 2,000 Americans. With national attention focused on these catastrophes, Congress passed the Steamboat Bill of 1838, the first piece of interstate commerce legislation. R. John Brockmann, a professor at the University of Delaware, tells us how this legislation evolved and eventually passed in Exploding Steamboats, Senate Debates, and Technical Reports, The Convergence of Technology, Politics and Rhetoric in the Steamboat Bill of 1838. The flaws of early steam technology and the industry's inability to regulate itself provide the impetus for his story. Brockmann examined how the legislation progressed and depi cts a complicated web of political alliances and parry politics . The bill eventually passed due to the groundswell of the public's concern over the loss of life. Industry's appeals to C ongress, however, succeeded in watering down the final ve rsion. Brockmann argues that the Steamboat Bill was "erroneously passed" and in essence failed to solve the problem. The 1838 bill, not stringently enforced, later forced C ongress to pass new legislation that imposed stricter regulations with more "teeth." Brockman n's book is not for the casual reader. It is a well-documented argument rhar traces the system atic development and missteps that led to the writing of this importan t legislation . The passage of the 1838 bill represents a watershed event in the regulation of industry by Congress and was the first of m any laws passed which guard the safety of the American public. ROBERT M. BROWNING ]R. Dumfries, Virginia
All Brave Sailors, by J. Revell Carr (Simon & Schuster, N ew York, 2004, 363pp, photos, map, appen, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 0-7432-3837-0; $26hc) le was rhe summer of 1947 when I first visited Mystic Seaport Museum with
my fa ther. His particular objective was to see the Charles W Morgan once again, bur I was more impressed by a simple display of a gray, scruffy, 18-foot clinker-built boat described by the label as the jollyboat of the British steamer Anglo-Saxon.
ALL BRAVE
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To my barely teen-aged sense of hisrory, here was a boat that had brought two young men from perdition to salvation; a boat that had "lived" history. Now, Revell Carr, the much-respected fo rm er curator and director of Mys tic Seaport, brings the tale to life, especially fo r the benefit of those "youngsters" born long after the harrowing events of Wo rld War II and rhe Bartle of rhe Atlanti c-the longest campaign in that global war. The pri ncipal characters in this story are two ships and a number of men whose lives converged briefly in August 1940. O ne ship, the British freighter AngloSaxon, was traveling bound for Argentina with a cargo of coal to exchange fo r grain to help feed the beleaguered British Isles. H er complement included 4 1 merchant offi cers and seamen, bur only two-Bob Tapscott and Roy Widdicom be-would make landfall at the end of this voyage. The other ship was the German armed merchant ship (AMS) Widder, disguised as the neutral Spanish merchant ship El Neptuno. Commanded by H ellmuth von Ruckreschell and manned by a crew of nearly 400 officers and men, rhe Widder's mission was w seek our and destroy British shipping in areas outside of the normal operating areas of the Nazi submarines . The author writes nor just of rhe excruciating tale of survival of two men cast adrift in a ship's boat with five others who, one by one, perish fro m wo unds, starvation , dehydration, and despai r, bur of their dif-
SEA HISTORY 107, SPRING/SUMMER 2004
fe ring backgrounds and reactions. H e writes eloquen tl y of the German skipper of Widder, vo n Ruckreschell, who wo uld have been a complex character in a G reek tragedy, neve r mind an acco unt of an all-too-routine murderous war with its tragic effects upon those who survived . About the only complaint this reviewer has is the lack of specifi c reference numbers in the text to guide the reader to the particular citati on in the endnotes. No n-academic publishers have increasingly reso rted to this technique of "uncluttering" the text, presum ably to avoid turning-off non-academic readers. Those of us inclined to check sources and who deligh t in exp lanato ry endnotes are nor please with this trend. Nonetheless, the book is thoroughly researched and well-written-a wo rthy addition to any library. RALPH LINWOOD SNOW Woolwich, M aine
Evolution's Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Wbo Sailed Charles Darwin Around the World, by Peter N ichols (H arper Collins, New Yo rk, 2003, 336pp, illus, sources, ISBN 0-06-00 8877-X; $24.95 hc) The co urse of history takes many tacks, occasionally toward an unexpected destination-so it is with Evolution's Captain . A captain of HMS Beagle rakes his life at sea. Under command of his successor, Robert FirzRoy, a whaleboat fro m the Beagle is stolen near T ierra de! Fuego. The search fo r the boat leads to rhe abduction of native Fuegians who are sent w Britain to be civilized. W hen the natives are returned, a then unknown natu ralist, Charles D arwin, acco mpanies them on the start of a five-year expedition. This voyage changes natural science forever and calls to question a closely-held belief of wes tern religion, a triumph presaging tragedy- a philosophical clash between FiczRoy and Darwin. These events and rhe figures who participated in them transcend what, on rhe surface, may appear to be a mundane acco unt of historical voyages of exp lorati on. Evolution's Captain is far more refin ed, eruditely addressing an impo rtant segment of the history of science, a social 45