Reviews Warship Under Sail: The USS Decatur in during the Navy's wrenching transmon the Pacific West by Lorraine McConaghy from wood and canvas to iron and steam. (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2009, 38 lpp, illus, maps, notes, biblio, and index, ISBN 978-0-29598955-6; $34.95hc) Historian Lorraine McConaghy' s Warship Under Sail is a thoroughly documented (118 pages of notes!) scholarly volume of ships and sailors, war, politics, art, history, adventure, intrigue, institutional transition, and technological advancement
WARSHIP UNDER SAIL THE USS DECATUR
in /he PAC I FIC WEST Lorraine McConaglry
with an appeal to rival Herman Melville's White jacket and the Patrick O'Brian novels. Beautifully published in a large format and adorned with supporting maps and illustrations, this bargain-priced book is simultaneously worthy of coffee tables, research desks, and library collections. Warship Under Sail is a study of the last years of USS Decatur's roughly quartercentury active service in the Navy-those years in the Pacific squadron (1855-59) when Decatur epitomized the best and worst of the wood-and-canvas navy. From afar, USS Decatur was a romantic cloud of white, cutting through waves at eight knots. Up close, she was a vessel of rotten timbers, manned by sick and alcohol-dependent crewmen who were, in turn, commanded by sick and alcohol-dependent officers. McConaghy places Decatur's actions in the context of Manifest Destiny and Young America's efforts to divert sectional struggle to national expansion. The four theaters of operations are set in separate chapters: passage of the Strait of Magellan; Seattle and the battle with Native Americans; Nicaragua and the filibusters; and on station off Panama-all taking place SEA HISTORY 132, AUTUMN 2010
Decaturwas three months passing the Strait, for example, when the steamer Massachu- -lllll;;;~ilj setts passed in a matter of weeks. Conflict-national, international, and personal-is reflected in the lives of the by the Crown. For a more balanced view, men of the Decatur. Drawing on logs and I suggest reading both Morrison's account letter books, McConaghy paints a picture and the journal of Dr. George Hamilton, of the men who lived and worked on the Pandora's physician, for the "other side" of ship . While not a pretty picture, it reveals the story. life aboard a warship at the end of the era For anyone interested in the Bounty of sail. saga, this vol ume is a most worthwhile DR. DAVID 0. WHITTEN addition to the extant non-fiction reading Auburn, Alabama currently available. WILLIAM H. WHITE After the Bounty: A Sailor's Account of Rumson, New Jersey the Mutiny and Life in the South Seas by James Morrison, RN, edited and annotated The Hemingway Patro/,s: Ernest Hemingby Donald A. Maxton (Potomac Books, way and His Hunt for U-boats by Terry Dulles, VA, 2009, 270pp, index, biblio, Mort (New York, Scribner, 2009, 254pp, gloss, ISBN 978-1-59797-371-7; $29.95hc) illus, appen, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978When I was researching the Bounty 1-4 165-9786-5; $26) story and the follow-on to it for my last Author Terry Mort was a student of book, When Fortune Frowns, I had occasion H emingway biographer Carlos Baker at to read parts ofBosun Mate Jam es Morrison's Princeton University and later, as a US journal in manuscript form at the Mitchell naval officer, served at sea on deployments to Library in Sydney, Australia. With the tale Vietnam and other locations. Thus, he brings now published in popular format and available to anyone interested in the nitty-gritty THE GLENCANNON of the story, I can suggest reading it with one caveat: Morrison's astonishing recall PRESS of the derails makes it useful to researchers, but also tends to make it somewhat tedious for pleasure reading. At once a bosun's mate in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, a linguist, NEW! Hardluck Coast, natural philosopher, zoologist, historian, west coast shipwrecks ... mathematician, and observer extraordinaire, Grave Passage, a Henry Morrison will amaze the reader not onlywith his in-depth observations of the peoples he Grave Mystery ... An Act of encounters in the South Seas, but also with Piracy, the story of the SS his remarkable memory for the detail of Mayaguez ... Hollywood to conversations and events surrounding the Bounty mutiny. Considering that he was Honolulu, LosAngeles. S.S. unable to write down any of his observations Co ... . The Tankers from A for nearly a year of his captivity, this is an to Z. The Victory Ships from incredible feat! Having forewarned the reader of the A to Z. The Liberty Ships hazards of this book, I would not hesitate to from A to Z ... more. recommend it to any interested in the Bounty FREE CATALOG 1-800-711-8985 story or in life in eighteenth-century Tahiti. Online catalog at Readers should keep in mind that Morrison is www.glencannon.com telling his side of the story; he was convicted of mutiny, though subsequently pardoned
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